


Before We Burn

by ParadiseParrot



Category: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TV 2012), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Historical, Angst, Bombing, Gen, One Extra Brother, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-27
Updated: 2018-10-27
Packaged: 2019-08-08 02:51:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 37,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16420985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ParadiseParrot/pseuds/ParadiseParrot
Summary: Summer 1945, and Leo's family is coping in wartime Japan after Raph enlists. But it's no safer at home, and the consequences are forever. [originally posted in 2015, on ff.net and here]





	Before We Burn

**Author's Note:**

> I originally wrote this in 2014-2015, and it's been sitting half-posted and probably forever unfinished. I decided it should be posted properly. So:
> 
> \- This is a World War II AU, set in Hiroshima, Japan. I did my very best to research the events and way of living carefully, out of respect for the people who actually lived this and didn't write historical fanfiction about it. It's not some neato setting, it's a world-altering event that made people suffer and die. I was worried about a bad reception, but overall people were welcoming, and I hope I've done everything justice.  
> \- Heed the warnings--a majority of the fic isn't graphic, but this is about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. My descriptions are as honest as I can be.  
> \- This is present tense, a way I don't really write any more, and I didn't go through and fix anything like grammar or spelling errors. This is a fic relic.  
> \- Dante is a turtle OC of mine, and if you really just can't stand OCs maybe skip this. But maybe give it a chance, too! I like writing him and that's why he's here.  
> \- I've posted it all in one chunk, because I lost my chapter markers and I'm not finishing it properly, so you might as well just binge it.  
> \- I don't think I'll finish this. Sorry! Thank you for reading.

This is the sixth week since Raph ran away.

It's still so odd, waking up without his brother's soft breathing nearby. The other morning sounds are the same, as Leonardo lies there on the bedrolls: mothers cooking breakfast, people biking to work, the occasional radio giving war news. There are more than usual after the raid got everyone up.

Leo should be getting some sleep, but he's always restless on an air raid night. Which means that lately he's been sleeping very poorly, with how often they blare out over the city these days. They've been awake for hours this time, in the neighbourhood shelter, but that won't stop sensei from getting up as usual to start breakfast.

Which he has, from the sound of his footsteps on the tatami mats outside their room, pulling out pans and dishes. Leo groans, stretching as he sits up and tries to wake up fully.

Beside him, Dante shifts. At six years old, the nightly raids are the hardest on him. He's still wearing his air-raid hood from last night, his eyes squeezed shut. Leo smiles fondly.

“Hey, baby brother,” he says. “Time to get up. Don't want to miss breakfast.”

Dante groans, rolling over into Leo's pillow. Donnie and Mikey are sitting up too, already rubbing the sleep out of their eyes. They don't need an older brother alarm clock so much, being only a few years younger than Leo himself.

“Will there be rice today?” is the first thing Mikey asks. He's old enough to remember when they had it every day, without thinking much about it. And fish, and pickled plums, and all kinds of things too expensive to get for people like them.

“It's Monday,” Donnie says as he stands up. “I counted the ration last night, and we should probably only be eating it every other Sunday now. It's just not enough.”

“Ugh,” Mikey exclaims. “I'm so sick of sweet potatoes. I bet Raph doesn't need to eat sweet potatoes every day.”

“He'll be eating worse than sweet potatoes at the front. Assuming he gets to eat anything.”

“Well, he's not there yet! Yoshio's brother went in January and he didn't leave training for three months.”

Leo sits Dante up himself and begins to untie his nightclothes, reaching behind him to get the little uniform their desk. He lays it out carefully before bed, every night.

Dante finally stands up, which means Leo can too, and begin to get dressed for work. People will be late at the factory after the commotion of such a long raid. No rush to get out of the house today.

“You don't have to put on my clothes,” Dante says, frowning and pushing Leo's hands away from his buttons. “I'm not a baby.”

Leo smiles at him, but he's only half-listening, thinking about Mikey's comment. Is Raph getting rice? Is Raph getting enough to eat at all? The war has been hard on everyone, even the imperial military.

They're only slightly late for breakfast, so sensei says nothing as he lays out their meals. Leo feels a little guilty, for not getting up to help today—but their father usually lets it go when an air-raid lasted as long as this one did.

For complaining about sweet potatoes so much, Mikey devours his immediately. Donnie is frowning at something, gaze distant, until Leo pokes him in the ribs.

“What's the matter?” Leo says, popping another bite into his mouth. They tease Donnie about this a lot, his many day dreams and deep gazes inward.

“Oh, nothing,” Donnie says. He sounds agitated. “I was just thinking about the U.S. We were pretty close to growing up there, weren't we? Things could have been different.”

Sensei frowns, standing up to refill the teapot. “Your mother wanted her children to grow up in the home country,” he says. “So you did. We didn't anticipate the war when we came back.”

“Yeah.” Donatello doesn't look satisfied, and to tell the truth, neither is Leo. They talk very little about America now since sensei's second marriage, and even less since the war made them a sworn enemy.

“It's war over there too, anyway,” Leo says. “No air-raids, but definitely less food and lots of work to do.” He knows it's much more complicated than that, and his answer is too simple for intelligent Donnie, but someone might overhear them on their way to work. They've already been reported once because sensei lived in California for so long. The keipeitai, the secret police, are probably already watching him at the university.

“Leo,” Dante asks, frowning into his bowl of sweet potatoes. “Why didn't you go join the Army?”

Leo looks up sharply. In the kitchen he sees sensei stiffen, back straight as a rod. “Well, I'm not old enough to be conscripted yet,” he says. “So I don't have to--”

“But that's where Raph is!” Dante says. He's agitated, too. “And he's one year younger! My teacher said it's an affront to the Emperor if boys don't join up now, even if they're not old enough. He said it doesn't matter as long as--”

“As long as, what, Leo goes off and dies like all those other high school boys?” Donnie asks. His eyes are hard. Beside him, Mikey has already finished his meal and is eyeing Donatello's unfinished bowl with interest. “We're not going to win, Dante. Better Leo stays here and we hope the war is over before the US lands on the beach.”

Dante's mouth is in a round little o of surprise. “But--”

“But nothing,” sensei says, leaving the kitchen. “America has Okinawa now. There's not enough food and all the big cities have been bombed. We can only hope that the Emperor sees sense before it's our city's turn, and before Raphael is finished his training.”

“But sensei--”

“Eat your sweet potatoes,” sensei says. The subject is closed.

“Sensei is way smarter than your teachers,” Mikey says cheerfully, setting down his chopsticks.“Don't say that at school or you'll get us all in trouble, but they only say that Emperor stuff because they're supposed to.”

“Absolutely,” Donnie says. His eyes are still dark. “It's all propaganda, Dante.”

“Pro-pa-ganda...” Dante mouths out. “What does that mean?”

Leo is suddenly not at all hungry, but he eats the last of his food regardless. They're lucky to have it and he can't let it go to waste. Ignoring the thought of Raph boarding a battleship, he checks his watch. 8:06.

“It's after eight, Mikey,” he says without looking up. “You'll be late.”

“Oh!” Michelangelo jumps up, running back into their bedroom and reappearing in seconds with a backpack over his shoulder, a cap over his head. “I actually was supposed to leave early today, ha! We're making firebreaks downtown, so I should have made it for roll call!”

Sensei frowns, but Leo expected that—he hates the war, so why would he approve of wartime student labour? Mikey is only 13.

“Pay attention to the air raids,” he says. “And come straight home after work, no jumping on the streetcar with your friends.”

Mikey is already out the door. “See you later!” he calls over his shoulder. Leo's brothers finish their meals quietly, listening to his footsteps fade away.

Leo looks at Donnie, who is beginning to stack the breakfast bowls. “You're not working today?”

Donnie gives him a rare smile. “Not today, thank goodness,” he says. “Our mobilization starts tomorrow, so we have the day off.”

School is such a joke these days that Leo is grateful to hear that. Donnie deserves a real education and not the imperial recitations. Even worse is imagining his bookish brother pulling down houses, hard work far outside the classroom.

“Well, Dante and I don't,” he says, standing up. “Are you ready to go, kiddo?”

Since the air raids started, Leo has been walking Dante to school. It's silly, since he might well be safer with his class in that sturdy building, and many other children walk that way, but Leo likes to keep a special eye on him all the same and know he got inside. He's never liked the thought of him walking so far alone anyway.

Dante is just standing up when sensei stops him, looking stern.

“Take your breakfast along,” sensei says. “We've discussed this, my son. No wasting food, so eat it on the way. Leonardo will take the bowl home on his way to work.”

It's probably impolite to eat breakfast out in the street, but this kind of concession is normal just to get a full meal into Dante. He frowns. “I'll meet you outside, Leo,” he says, turning to get his backpack out of their bedroom. “I'll just be two seconds!”

Leo shares another smile with Donatello as he turns toward the yard. Mikey's cat is grooming herself in the window and sensei has started clearing the dishes, Donnie standing to take the bowls to the sink.

It's a warm morning, and it will be even hotter later today. Whenever he steps outside now he always half-expects to see Raphael, leaning against the house with a cigarette he'd begged off of soldiers. They'd all complained about the smell of smoke, but now Leonardo finds himself missing it. Maybe at the training camp Raph gets cigarettes as part of his rations, a luxury in exchange for the hard training.

Leo frowns. They haven't gotten even one letter yet, and it makes him fret about his brother being sent into battle already, though there would at least another month before he's sent into combat.

He's wondering what Raph is doing now, watching the neighbour girls disappear down the road to school, when he is blinded by a white-hot flash.

* * *

 

At first Leo's fascinated by what he sees. It's bright, brighter than staring into the flash on sensei's camera, and it covers everything. It's nothing like the incendiary bombs he has seen in small raids. He doesn't have a lot of time to ponder this, as a roar fills his ears and throws him backwards.

The air raid warning passed, he thinks, the world still screaming in his ears. Then, like a blink, nothing. Leo doesn't know how long he is unconscious.

It feels like years before he finally comes to, full of unsettling dreams, and he opens his eyes. Immediately the smoke and dust sting them, and he coughs hard, like he's been ill for weeks. Everything is dark and it takes a moment for him to realize that he's under their awning, pinned in by the maple from their yard. The leaves of the tree have been scorched away, the tips of the branches slightly alight. Leo stares in amazement.

The back of his neck stings with pain, and something is sticking against his back, but he doesn't want to move. The smoke is making it hard to breathe and he can see nothing past the scorched branches—he doesn't think he can move at all. A bomb must have fallen directly on their house. He closes his eyes.

“Leo! Help! It hurts!”

Dante's voice is faint, a few feet away from him. It makes him sit up right away—and almost fall again, at the pain in his pinned leg. It takes a moment for him to extricate himself from underneath the tree, and when he tries to stand he finds that what was once their house is nothing but a mess of wood and glass, something he can barely find footing in.

“I'm coming, Dante!” he screams, digging desperately through the rubble in the first spot he sees. “Donnie? Sensei? Where are you?!”

To his left, he sees something moving. To his shock it's a hand, dirty and sticky with blood. It's scrabbling at the wood pinning its owner in.

“I think he was in the bedroom doorway?” Donnie says faintly, muffled by the debris. He sounds like he's in pain and Leo's heart lurches. “Wherever that is, I mean. The house is ... there is no house, I think, if I'm under all this. Can you get me out?”

Dante is still wailing for help, but Leo can't see him at all yet. He begins to pull what used to be their house off of Donnie, struggling with one large crossbeam but finally releasing him from the chest up. Then Donatello, face twisted in pain, is able to pull himself from where he'd been stuck. Leo can see that there's glass stuck in his thigh, and a wound on his head is bleeding into his eyes. Looking dazed, Donnie wipes it away with his wrist.

“I heard sensei groan earlier,” he says. “Near the kitchen, I think? We were doing the dishes and I said something about Dante wasting food, and he was laughing ... the air raid warning is over.”

Leo says nothing, trying to pull the worst of the rubble away in an effort to find the rest of their family. It's another couple of minutes of digging, following the cries, before Dante even appears, looking terrified and dirty but, so far, unhurt. He gets their smallest brother's chest and arms free too, but when he begins to pull, Dante cries even louder.

“No!” he says, squeezing Leo's hand in warning. “It hurts!”

“There's no time to complain about whether it hurts,” Leo snaps, uncharacteristically sharp.

Ignoring the protests, he drags Dante out from under their bedroom doorway and sets him next to Donatello. The briefest of once-overs reveals that he is, amazingly, almost completely unhurt beyond small bruises and cuts. More than anything he's terrified, shaking with shock and tears and grabbing at Donnie's sleeve.

As he pulls apart more of their house, Leo is becoming aware that there are more faint cries surrounding them, their neighbours trapped in the rubble as well. He can also see others digging in his peripheral, those who were lucky enough to escape. The only time he looks up is in shock, when a man staggers by horribly burned, his skin hanging in sheets on his arms. He doesn't have time to stare.

“There's fire, Leo,” Donnie says suddenly, just as Leonardo finds sensei's hand, sticking out from underneath part of the roof. He squeezes it hard, trying to gate in the rush of terror that overcomes him. They can all smell the smoke—it's hard to breathe through it, or even see more than ten feet in front of him.

Leo is getting increasingly desperate, trying to pull the largest pieces off of sensei. But these ones are stuck, pinned in by yet more rubble and impossible to move. He does manage to free sensei's head, his father's lips pressed together in pain. “Leonardo,” he says. “Do you know what has happened?”

“I-I don't ...” Leo says, trying to hold back tears as he pulls uselessly on a crossbeam. It's as wide as their maple tree and pinning sensei's waist, impossibly heavy. “I don't know. I think the neighbourhood was bombed.”

Sensei opens his eyes, looking around at the damage. Closes them again. “I smell smoke,” he says. “You're in danger if you stay here. Your brothers are out?”

“Yeah,” Leo gasps. He can feel the heat at his back, the fire licking through the houses on their street. “You will be too in a minute, sensei.”

Sensei looks pained. “You're all in danger if you stay. Go find somewhere safe—get word to Raphael, if you can. Find Michelangelo.”

“We can't leave without you!” Donnie bursts out. He, too, is now trying to pull off the worst of the debris, but they won't be able to extricate their father without outside help. Leo knows this, and he also knows that nobody is paying attention to them or their personal tragedies. The entire street is in the midst of a personal tragedy.

Leo hears Dante make a frightened sound, and scramble over some of the rubble. “Leo, hurry! There's a lot of fire!”

He wants to cry and scream. “I love you, father,” is all he manages. “I just need to—I'm trying—god damn it!”

Sensei's face twists in anger, more angry than Leonardo has ever seen it. “Get out!” he shouts, and Donnie is so surprised that he loses his footing and cries out in pain.

Leonardo has two choices: refuse to leave sensei and die together, his little brothers with them, or take the two he's freed and try to find a safe place. The answer is obvious--Raph and Mikey cannot come home and find all their bones in a tangle, no one to meet them. The thought is unbearable, just as unbearable as leaving their father to the fire.

“Can you walk?” he asks Donnie, forcing himself to stand up and turn away. Donnie nods, but on his first step he collapses again, giving a frustrated sob. Leo doesn't wait, and grabs him, Donnie yelping in surprise as Leo puts him on his back. “Hang on,” he orders, grabbing a blanket sticking out from the house and tying it underneath Donatello, holding him against his waist. He's not sure where the strength has come to hold him up, Donnie is taller than he is, but he does it, and grabs Dante's wrist. Now that he's standing up, he can see that the flames have been closing in almost all sides, fed by the wood and paper of Hiroshima's homes.

He doesn't have time to think too hard about it, so they run. Right past the fire, over what used to be Mr. Murakami's restaurant and into their street. The air is thick with the smell of burning wood and blood.

This is when Leonardo begins seeing them, the sights so unbelievable that if he had heard about them he would have been sure they were exaggerated. A girl, sitting on top of a house in flames, people crying for help inside; people whose eyeballs have popped out of their heads, melted on their faces; women with glass stuck in every part of their body. Besides the cries for help in the ruins, people are quiet, trying to stay ahead of the fire. It seems as if everyone around him is horribly burned, but that kind of damage from one raid doesn't make sense to him.

He doesn't know how long they run for, or exactly how far they go, but as they move he begins to realize that it was not just their neighbourhood that has been destroyed. It seems like all of Hiroshima is on fire, with its entire population rushing away from the city centre and towards a safer place.

At some point Dante trips and can't get up again, and Leo picks him up too, holding him against his shoulder as he runs. Leo is numb; his emotions feel trapped under water, processing what he's seeing but unable to bring himself to feel anything about it.

Finally, finally, he stops. He falls to his knees in the middle of a wide street and sets Dante down beside him. Suddenly the weight of his brothers feels real and just as exhausting as it should. Leo looks around—they're a considerable distance from their old neighbourhood, and here, for now, the houses have escaped the flames. He lets Donnie drop the ground, and regrets his haste when he hears his brother cry out in pain.

He turns toward the wall of fire, that horribly burned and bleeding people still stream away from. It's difficult to remind himself that they, too, are human, just badly hurt. Somewhere in that inferno sensei has burned to death, and maybe Mikey has too. Maybe Mikey is part of this procession of scorched ghosts, and will collapse alone, unrecognizable. He turns back to his brothers.

“Leo,” Dante says, pointing behind them. The dirt on his face is streaked with tears, but he's no longer crying. “That lady's chest is blue.”

Leonardo has no idea why this is what Dante has focused on, among everything. but he looks, and for a moment he thinks Dante is right—the woman's breasts are pale blue, almost textured from a distance. But a moment later it occurs to him what he is really seeing, and winces in sympathy.

“It's glass, buddy,” he says, squeezing Dante's hand. “A window broke on her, I guess. She hasn't turned blue.”

“Oh,” is all Dante says in response. He sits on the road next to Donatello, who is pulling glass slivers from his own thigh, wincing with each one.

Leonardo decides to take this moment and get a better look at their injuries. Dante is limping from when he tripped, and filthy, but his injuries are minimal, especially compared to the people streaming around them.

Donatello is less lucky. Leo thinks he might have broken something, from the look of his leg, and there's still blood streaming from his forehead. And his thigh, and his shoulders. He realizes Donnie is covered in it and looking very pale, so Leo reaches down to his clothes—which are torn and scorched—to tear off pieces and bind the worst of his brother's wounds. Donnie seems to exhausted to talk, but he does touch Leo's shoulder as he sits up, a silent thanks.

Leo is starting to wonder if being outside meant being burned. The people with hanging skin seem countless when he really looks, but he himself seems well enough. The worst of his injuries seem to be a deep cut on his arm, and a spot on his face where a nail stuck through. He binds the former too, but does little else for himself. There's no time for him right now.

“So now what?” he asks, mostly to himself. It occurs to him, fully, that they are homeless orphans. Mikey is missing, and they need to get word to Raphael somehow. But the immediate problems are Donnie's injuries and their proximity to the fire. Just how far does the devastation go? Leo stands up.

“We need a hospital,” Dante says. “For Donnie. And all these other people need a hospital. Did the Americans do this?” he asks, frowning around at the destruction.

Leo only nods. The direction of downtown—where all the hospitals are situated—is blocked off by the wall of fire. People are only leaving that direction, so it must have been bombed too. He won't take them back in there, hospital or not.

He ends up rummaging through the nearby houses, impulsively and silently apologizing to whichever inhabitants have abandoned it. He ends up sticking an oversized air raid hood onto Dante's head, and a jacket around Donnie's shoulders. After some deliberation, he puts two more summer jackets on Dante as well, though the flames have made the wind extremely hot.

“I'm warm,” Dante complains, as Leonardo helps Donnie stand, leaning heavily on his shoulder. “It's summer, Leo!”

It is entirely unreasonable to be putting his brothers in layer of stolen clothes, in the midst of a fire, and he doesn't care. Right now it feels perfectly natural, and makes him feel slightly better. He takes Dante's hand again, and on they walk.

This is considerably slower going, but he still isn't sure where his burst of strength appeared from and is unsure of whether he could do it again. He only ends up carrying Donatello again when an oily black rain falls briefly from the sky. It seeps through Leo's hair, his underwear, everything, seeming to coat his skin.

“Don't drink that!” he hears Dante call out to a burned figure—so scorched that Leo can't tell how old they are, let alone their gender. But these people must be desperately thirsty, after the heat of the fire. They move on, in the direction of one of Hiroshima's seven rivers.

Dante screams when they finally reach the bank, and Leonardo wants to. Another mess of bleeding, burning people, corpses bloated by the river water. Donnie presses his face into Leo's neck and they continue on.

“Excuse me,” Leo asks a man who is only somewhat burned. “Do you know how far out the damage is? My brother needs medical attention.”

The man laughs derisively. “So does everyone else,” he snaps. Then he must see how Leo's face falls, so he points down the road. “Maybe the military will have the trains running soon,” he says. “Try and get out to the suburbs.” Leo says nothing in response. On they go.

They finally find themselves at a clearing, somewhere that must have been a park once. It is still green, unburned. Here the black rain has stopped, and the area seems to surge and shift with injured and the dead. Leo is aware again of his deep, permeating exhaustion and drops down, letting Donnie down much more carefully this time. Without a word, he lays his head on the grass and pulls Dante to the grass next to him. He can hear Donnie groaning quietly as he tries to get comfortable.

“What time is it?” Donnie asks, once he's on his good side. Leo only shakes his head, watching the fire and black smoke not far off. It's too dark to tell, and he doesn't know how long they walked for. So he doesn't think about it.

They sleep.

* * *

 

Leo's dreams are strange. Their family sits together eating breakfast, and Raphael is trying to make sensei snap, arguing about the morality of the war as their mother spoons rice and fish into Dante's bowl. Mikey is confused: “Mama, you're in the urn! Stop making breakfast!” and Leo wants to ask what's going on, why isn't sensei's second wife here instead? Sensei seems unaware of this confusion, still patiently trying to talk Raph down and Donnie rolls his eyes, closing their bedroom door.

“Your parents are in the fire, burning,” Leo's mother says cheerfully to Dante. “Eat your breakfast.”

Raphael points in their mother's direction. “You're one to talk about honour, when you couldn't even honour Mom's memory!” Dante begins to cry, reaching out for Leo.

Then a white-hot flash, and then nothing, nothing at all. Smoke chokes his lungs.

He sits up immediately, gasping and hands scrabbling at the ground. It takes Leo a moment to remember where he is, what's been happening to them. He looks around, suddenly panicked that his remaining family has disappeared.

Donatello is still asleep, but so very pale; his head wound stopped bleeding in the night. Dante is sitting on a concrete slab next to them, holding a rice ball in one hand.

“Where did you get that?” Leo asks. He feels sore, and his head aches like it's been stuffed with cotton balls.

Dante's little face lights up. “You're awake!” He points ahead of them, to several makeshift tents. Soldiers move in and out of them, carrying injured people or supplies. Leo looks for Raphael and doesn't see him. “They're giving them out. I snuck some for you and Donnie, too. They thought you were dead but I told them you weren't.”

Leo's chest hurts—the memories are rushing back, and he can see the bodies strewn all over even now. Smoke rises from Hiroshima, but the firestorm seems to have died down somewhat. He wonders how many other people, like sensei, died in there, and how many more will die later. He tries not to think too hard about Michelangelo.

“Excuse me,” he says to a passing soldier. “What time is it? Was the bomb yesterday?”

“It's 1:30 PM, on August 8th,” he says, and then rushes off again, like he never stopped. His jaw drops.

“We've been asleep two days?” he exclaims, loud enough to make a nearby woman look up and Donnie groan, stirring.

“Five more minutes, sensei,” he mumbles, covering his eyes, and that's enough to make Leo's chest seize up over again. Dante pauses too, looking down at his rice ball. Leo notices that he's shucked off his three jackets, but that the air raid hood is still tied snugly. Frowning, he reaches into his pocket—then pauses, staring in wonder at his hand.

“Leo, I'm still holding my chopsticks,” he says, like it's the most amazing thing he's ever seen.

Leo actually smiles—Dante's confusion is so real and sweet, familiar compared to what surrounds them. “You've held your chopsticks all this time? Well, I think you can leave them.”

“I can't,” Dante says, and his face immediately crumples. “I can't open my fingers.”

Leo's smile is gone again in a blink and he takes Dante's hand, prying open his fingers one at a time. He had, in his panic two days ago, put three jackets on Dante—how had he missed that Dante had had his fist curled around these?

Sniffling, Dante reaches into his pocket and brings out two more rice balls, handing them to Leonardo before taking another halfhearted bite of his own. Leo suddenly realizes how ravenous he is and downs his in two bites, before turned back to Donnie. Their brother is sitting up now, looking around and looking despondent.

“Oh my god,” he says in a low voice. “Leo, just look at this.”

Leo knows what he means, just from looking around at the charred devastation. Bodies everywhere, some piled by soldiers but others still strewn between the injured. They have slept through the beginnings of the relief efforts, it seems, and Leo is relieved in a strange way. At least the fires are out.

“Eat,” he says, handing Donnie a rice ball. “Baby brother got these for us before we even woke up.”

Donnie takes it but only sets it in his lap, staring down at it like he's too exhausted to bring it to his mouth. It takes a few more minutes of cajoling to get Donnie to start eating at all. Leo is worried about him, how sticky with blood he is and how pale. The thought of losing who he has salvaged makes him feel nauseous.

“I'm going to see what I learn from those soldiers, okay?” Leo says, standing up. “Dante, do not budge. Make sure Donatello rests while I'm gone.”

Dante, eager to have a responsibility, is immediately pushing at Donnie's shoulder to lie him back down on the grass. Donnie closes his eyes and obeys, rice ball still unfinished. He's so exhausted. Normally Donatello would be right next to him, eager to learn everything about what is obviously a new bombing technique and new kind of warfare. He would probably even be trying to treat people from what he's gleaned from books.

The smell of burned flesh is somehow even stronger near the tent, and Leo can see that the soldiers have put injured here, those who are unrecognizable and cannot move themselves. Trying not to gag, he approaches the soldier he guesses is the highest ranking. The man doesn't look up when Leo greets him, scribbling something onto a dirty clipboard.

“Sir, I need to know if any relief efforts have been set up yet, whether there's any hospitals open so I can take my brothers--”

The soldier looks up, frowning. “The whole city is gone,” he says, and Leo can see the bags under his eyes. “The Americans dropped this new type of bomb. We're doing the best we can, but if your brother is one of those students with full body burns then just make him comfortable, we can't--”

“He's not,” Leo says immediately, but his stomach drops. His fear that Mikey is among these people is very real, it seems. “He's got some bad cuts and maybe a break, but I think he'll live! Someone just needs to help him!”

Leo must sound truly desperate, because the soldier looks up, handing Leo a piece of paper as he does. “Disaster certificate,” he says before Leo can ask. “We've been writing them all day--it'll get you rations and free on trains. We don't have much for your brother, but men are going around to the ones who aren't beyond hope.” Leo meets his eyes and sees that the soldier is not hopelessly cold, just exhausted, exhausted as Leo. He does feel sorry.

Leonardo bows in his thanks, then stuffs the certificate into his pocket. The soldier turns away to speak to someone else, and a moment later Leo is pointing out his brothers to them, so another man can approach with bandages and iodine. It seems to be all they all they have, but it's much better than nothing. His knees are weak with relief.

It strikes him, as he walks back from the tent, how quiet all these injured people are. Nobody cries out except for water, and the only talk is among the soldiers or the least wounded. The loudest noise is a baby crying nearby, a sound Leo recognizes as hungry fussing from Dante's babyhood. He shudders at the thought of trying to feed an infant in this wasteland.

When he returns to his brothers, Donnie has iodine and clean bandages on his wounds, the soldier already hustling off to the next patient. He's wincing from the sting, but is finally finishing his rice ball.

“This is better than nothing,” he says to Leo, sounding much more like himself. “I mean, infection might have already set in after this long, but none of it was inflamed from what I can see. I'm amazed we found a place that had this much at all.”

Donnie does look flushed, but that might just be the heat. At least he's been properly bandaged.

“I need to go look for Mikey,” Leo says, absently pulling Dante's comforting weight against him. “Now that the fires are out, maybe I can find someone from his class and see if he made it at all.”

Don closes his eyes. “The soldier told us all the burns happened to people outdoors,” he said. “I guess this new kind of bomb caused extremely high temperatures along with the flash ... let's just hope he was shielded or something like us.”

“Yeah,” Leo says, but he knows Mikey had been running along the road, out in the warm sun. “The man at the tent said junior school students keep coming in beyond hope. I have to find him.”

Dante squeezes Leo's fingers with his own, shifting a little bit in Leo's grip. “Mikey will be okay,” he says. “You found Donnie and me, so you can find him too. Can I come?”

“No,” Leo says, immediately. He sees no reason to expose his brothers to more horror than they have already needed to see; this place is full of corpses too, but it seems relatively safe compared to the rest of Hiroshima. “Listen, Dante,” he says, gently pushing up Dante's chin so Leo can look into his eyes. “I'm counting on you, okay? Donnie still needs to rest and stay here, and I'm going to need you to stick close to him. Don't go out of sight and make him worry, okay?”

“Will you be back with Mikey tonight?” he asks. Leo smiles faintly, reaches out, ruffles his hair. Dante is endlessly trusting of Leo, in Leo's ability to keep them safe. It makes his heart ache.

“I'll do my best,” he says, not meeting Donnie's eyes. “I have a whole city to look through. Maybe while you're here you can look at the soldiers coming by and see if Raph is with any of the units?”

His little brother lights up right away. “Okay!” he says, shuffling away from Leo immediately to stand and scan the passersby.

Leo squeezes Donnie's hand. “Rest up,” he says. Donnie closes his eyes.

“Maybe I should have gone to work after all,” Donnie says. “I mean, then Mikey and I could look out for each other, wherever he is...”

Or maybe you'd both be dead. “I'm grateful the three of us made it here,” is all he says. “I'll see you later.”

Dante is already pointing out soldiers to Donnie, wondering aloud if they know Raph, when Leo turns to go. He doesn't know where to begin—the house? Or, what's left of their house. As Leo walks he desperately wants to avoid whatever he will encounter there, because it certainly involves bleached bones, scattered with the ashes of his father's two wives. Leo has lived in that house for as long as he can remember.

So despite his own better judgement, he skirts their neighbourhood, climbing over rubble and on whatever roads have been cleared towards downtown.

The city is a wasteland.

The further in he goes, the worse it gets, and Leo can only spy the department store and the domed city hall rising up over the blast. Residents are milling about, digging through their homes or calling out names. He stops at elementary schools turned relief stations, reads through the messages people have left on the blackboards until he wants to weep. Everyone is looking for their loved ones. He is not special.

A few times familiar people stop him, asking if he knows the whereabouts of a classmate, a neighbour. Leo can only shake his head. He asks them about Michelangelo in turn, and the result is always the same.

It's only after hours of fruitless searching, when the shadows are finally getting long, that he circles back to his old neighbourhood.

A few people are digging through their homes, but when Leonardo sees his own he feels nauseous, weak. He aches with the shame of leaving sensei's bones there for one day longer. What was he hoping to see? A sign from Michelangelo, saying where he is? There have been literal signs sticking up from some of the rubble, saying that family members are alive and have left the city, or are at whatever relief station. Resigned, he turns to go.

He stops in one more school before the trek back, stepping gingerly over the laid-out injured and apologizing when his footing is wrong. He doesn't bother to ask the volunteers—he knows by now that they are desensitized to his plight. Instead he scans the faces of living and dead, occasionally bending down to look at a nametag or a keepsake if they prove unrecognizable.

“Hamato-san.”

The voice is weak, a bit of a distance in the schoolroom, but it's addressing Leo's uncommon last name. He looks up, and a burn victim is waving him over, her face swollen on one side.

“Do you recognize me, Hamato-san?” she says, and after a moment Leo realizes he does—one of Mikey's many friends, always in and out of their home. She had been very pretty, and giggly, a favourite of his brother.

“Kataoka-san, have you seen Michelangelo?” he asks immediately, not expecting an answer and shocked when she nods, wincing with the effort.

“On the way to our work site,” she says, and Leo's heart leaps. “I had to get my sister ready for school after the air raid so I was late, and I met him as we were turning onto the main street. That's the only reason I'm still here, I think, because I didn't get downtown.”

If she didn't get down there, there's no way Mikey did in the time he spent walking. “What about after the flash?”

She closes her one good eye. “I didn't see him,” she says. “But there was only one way out of the fire on that street corner, and soldiers showed up along the riverbank asking if people wanted care at Ninoshima. I didn't think my mother would find me there, but it's a small island. It wouldn't hurt any worse to check.”

She was wrong—it would hurt, because if he was still not there, or dead, then Leo will have made this journey for nothing, and will have failed utterly as an older brother. And if he gets back, now even later than he promised, and something has happened to the brothers who were with him ...

He reaches out and squeezes the girl's hand. “Thank you,” he says, genuinely. “I'll try Ninoshima. Good luck finding your mother, Hideko-san.” He remembers her first name just then, knowing that Mikey would want him to be friendly, a little informal. It seems to comfort her.

“If you see my mother, tell her where I am!” she says, with a tinge of desperation. “I'm so lonely here.”

Leonardo has never met her mother in his life, but he nods, squeezing her hand once more before turning to go, a new force of will in his blood.

* * *

 

Even at dusk, Ujina is crowded, and Leo has to jostle for a space even near the gunships leaving for the island. Leo has never been there himself—it has always been a smudge in the distance, a small outpost with only a few thousand people. He's grateful when he can find an opening and step into the boat, alongside a couple hundred wounded people, because he is starting to feel very green. He isn't sure if it's the smell of death and cremations, the stress, or a combination of it all. He hopes Donatello and Dante feel better than he does.

“Everybody out!” the soldier shouts some time later, and Leo is the first on the dock despite his nausea. He sets out for what seems to be the relief area, and is shocked immediately at the sheer volume of people here, shifting and groaning on this tiny island. It's been unaffected by the blast, and the green trees and grass are less of a comfort than they should be.

He walks through the neat rows, constantly needing to step around or away from hands tugging at his pant leg, voices groaning at him for water. Leo is single-minded, scanning their faces for Mikey's and forgetting them as soon as he knows it's not him.

Leo will be here all night if he has to, looking at thousands of bodies just to be sure Michelangelo is not among them. When he gets back to the city, he'll make a sign like he should have to begin with, and collect their father's bones. He'll be a good son and brother, and try not to think about what they'll say to him when he returns without Mikey.

Look at all these faces, after all. There are thousands in Hiroshima and beyond all in need of their families, but everything is a mess of blood and fire and panic. There is no way he'll find Mikey.

He is thinking this, looking up from checking a bloated corpse's student nametag, when he sees Michelangelo at the end of the row.

Leo doesn't know how he got there so quickly, but he yells something that's either Mikey's name or just a relieved scream and is at his side, running his hand over Mikey's cheek, through his curls, taking one of his hands.

He wants to cry when Mikey's eyes crack open, his face registering what he's seeing, before it lights up with joy. “Leo!” he says. “I knew you would find me! I knew it!”

He really does cry then, sitting Mikey up to gently wrap his arms around him and press his face into the crook of his shoulder.

“I was sure you were dead,” he says, voice cracking. It feels like a dam has broken inside him, full of pain and relief that he had had to plug up when they were running from the inferno.

“Look at us, though, now we've been out to Ninoshima!” Mikey says when Leo pulls away. His eyes are bright with tears now, too, but he's smiling, golden as always.

Leo actually laughs at that, wiping his eyes. Mikey sounds like he's been on an exciting adventure, instead of bombed two days ago.

He takes a moment to look at Mikey's injuries, and his stomach seizes. One arm and part of his torso are badly burned, his clothes in shreds like his skin. His back is covered in cuts, and he's holding the burned arm at an angle that suggests a break. But compared to many of the people Leo has seen, he tells himself, this is nothing. Mikey will survive this.

Mikey sees him looking and his face falls. “It's bad, huh,” he says, and Leo shakes his head.

“There's been a lot worse.” He crouches beside Mikey, thinking about the charred black faces and melted eyes he saw when he was running with their brothers. “How did you get all the way out here?”

Michelangelo frowns, and shakes his head. “Not yet,” he says. “I ... want to talk to sensei about it first. Before I think too hard about everything.”

Leo breathes deeply, squeezing Mikey's good hand in both of his. He hasn't had to say it yet, because Donnie and Dante saw it too, and now the words feel rough, sandpapered coming up.

“Sensei is dead. I'm sorry, Mikey,” he says, and his little brother's face crumples. He cries, deep and anguished, and Leonardo feels like the worst person on Earth to have brought that pain on Mikey, after the things he must have seen.

He swallows back tears of his own, waiting for Michelangelo to cry it out and massaging his hand until he begins to calm. Mikey lets go of Leo's hand, wiping his eyes with his wrist.

“Donnie and Dante?” Mikey whispers, as if afraid of the answer. Leo did come alone, after all.

“Fine,” Leo says. “Donnie got a bit cut, but they're fine. I just left them today to come and get you, but we're going right back.”

Mikey nods, swallowing hard. “We need to get something to Raph,” he says. “About what happened.”

“I'm going to go back to the house tomorrow and leave him a message,” Leo says. He doesn't mention sensei's bones. “Do you want to get going?”

Mikey looks towards the dock, then shakes his head. “I was here last night too, and it's too dark for the boats to run. We'll have to go in the morning.”

Leo glances up, and realizes that he was so focused on Mikey that it had gotten dusky without his notice. His head aches with the thought of Mikey here since that first day, alone and wondering when someone would come for him. If someone would come at all. Leo shifts, gets comfortable sitting beside him.

“First thing in the morning we'll go back, and we can get word out to Raphael,” Leo says, trying to sound cheerful. “And then we'll be together again.”

Mikey looks away. “We won't,” he says. Leo remembers why, and swears internally. Nothing will be right again.

“Let's concentrate on finding Raph,” he says. “And get some rest so we can get on the first boat back. It's going to be alright now, Mikey.”

Mikey nods, but he looks close to crying again. Leo distracts them both by ripping what's left of his shirt into a sling for Mikey's arm—something that makes Mikey cry out in pain from the burns, but Leo tells him sharply must be done. At least, he thinks so. It's better than leaving it hanging on that angle. He wishes he had something for his brother's burns.

He makes Mikey as comfortable as he can, then waits for him to sleep, watching the cremation fires burn on the Hiroshima skyline.

* * *

 

The next morning they do get on one of the earliest boats, full of more soldiers and supplies than people. Leo found last night that most have come to Ninoshima to die, rather than to recuperate. Mikey sleeps on his shoulder the whole way back, and Leo feels bad waking him at Ujina, groggily helping him back onto the pier.

“Did you sleep well?” Mikey asks when they're walking away, and Leo laughs, ruffling his brother's hair.

“Not at all,” he says. He dozed once or twice, but he feared that if he stopped paying attention, Mikey would slip away, like so many others around them. His brothers couldn't afford Leonardo wasting time on things like sleep, anyway.

It takes much longer this time, with Leo keeping a slow pace and with Mikey's arm slung around his shoulders. Michelangelo is staring around the whole time, amazed at how much damage the fire caused.

“And they're saying this was just one bomb?” Mikey says, eyes wide. Today the main roads are marginally easier to navigate, and Leo can see fewer bodies now that crews have started to come through.

After his wandering yesterday, he gets lost a couple of times, the streets so unfamiliar now. When they do find the relief area again, it's almost noon. Leo realizes Donnie and Dante are not where he left them, and his heart lurches.

He panics, squeezing Mikey's hand hard. “Donnie?! Dante!” he calls, scrambling to help Mikey sit down on a clear spot of the grass. There are fewer people here now, he realizes with horror, but the cremation fire near the road is much bigger.

To his eternal relief, Dante appears from behind an old concrete wall. As soon as he sees who's been calling him, his face lights up and he bolts, right for them.

“Mikey! Leo, you were gone all night!” he wails, throwing his arms around both of them. “Donnie's so mad at you, he thought something bad happened!”

Leo resists saying that of course he did, the past days have been nothing but a string of terrible things. Mikey is wincing at the force of Dante's hug, but he forces a smile anyway, his burned hand hovering over Dante's head like he wants to ruffle his hair.

“Where is Donnie?” Leo asks, still scanning the park. His youngest brother's reaction would have been considerably different if he had come back to a dead brother, but he's still relieved when Dante points to a grove of trees and bamboo, a little scorched but mostly still green.

“We moved over there because he feels sick,” Dante says.

Leo frowns in worry. “How sick?” he asks, as they turn toward the grove. Now he can see several children Dante's age behind that wall, peering after them. One is holding a dirty cloth ball in her hands, and for a moment Leo lets himself be amazed at their resilience, to be willing to play at a time like this.

When they turn the corner, Donnie is lying on his side, head pillowed on a jacket folded under his head. He's pale and can barely lift himself up when he sees Michelangelo, reaching out one hand for him. His eyes grow wide when he sees the extent of Mikey's injuries.

“Where were you?” he asks, as Leo grabs another of Dante's coats to try and make Mikey comfortable. Leo gives his hand a firm squeeze. It's clammy and hot. “Dante cried all night for you.”

“I did not,” Dante says, and Mikey snickers.

“I did get Mikey, didn't I?” Leo says, forcing a smile as he checks his brother's forehead. Leo himself still feels sick himself, but there's no way he looks this bad, when he can do so much walking. “I had to go to Ninoshima to find him, and I spent the night. I'm sorry.”

Donnie closes his eyes, but Dante looks amazed. “Ninoshima?” he says. “That's far! Mikey, how did you get to Ninoshima?”

Mikey shakes his head, covering his eyes with his good hand. “A soldier pulled me out of the river and put me on a boat,” he says. “I'll tell you another time, okay? I'm really tired.”

Dante frowns, trying to adjust Mikey's jacket-pillow more comfortably underneath him. It's unusual for Michelangelo to not be talkative, and Dante knows it. Leo understands—Mikey has seen a lot of horror these few days, with no one to bring him comfort.

He checks Donnie more carefully after that, wishing desperately for sensei to be here doing this instead. Donnie's wounds aren't inflamed, and on closer inspection what Leo thought was a broken ankle is more likely just sprained and swollen. But he's still so pale, and shivering with fever. He feels a rush of confused fear when he finds tiny purple spots, along Donnie's neck and arms like he's been pricked with pins.

“What is it?” Donnie asks, seeing Leo's expression change. “Is there infection?”

Leo shakes his head, trying to force another smile. “No, it's nothing,” he says. “You're probably sick from all this awful stuff in the air on top of your wounds. Just get some more rest.”

Donatello sighs. “All I've been doing is resting,” he says. “I want to find out more about this new bomb. It's amazing we all got out with what we did, from what I've been able to see from here.” He shifts onto his back, wincing at the pain.

Leo is so tempted to lie down next to them, and tell Dante to wake him up if anything happens, but there is still one more thing he has to. He should have done it yesterday on his search for Michelangelo, but hadn't been able to bring himself to get close enough.

He steels his nerves. He can rest when this is done.

“I have to go again,” he says. “I need to see what's left of the house. And get sensei's bones.” He hears Donnie suck in a sharp breath, and his heart aches. “I need to leave Raph a message, too,” he adds. “Maybe they'll let him come find us.”

“I doubt it,” Donnie says immediately, not looking at him. Leo doesn't answer.

“No!” Dante says suddenly. He's kneeling, looking at Leo with wide, bright eyes. His lower lip trembles. “I don't want you to go again!”

“This is the last time,” Leo says, reaching out to pull him close. Dante pushes him away. “This is very important, Dante, and I need to--”

“Stop it! I know it's important, I'm not a baby!” he shouts. Leo can see his shoulders shaking, tears pouring down his brother's face already. “I just ...”

Mikey reaches out a hand. “What is it?” he asks, more gently than Leo could have ever managed. Dante wipes his eyes furiously.

“I just hoped sensei got out,” he chokes out. “I thought, maybe ... since he's really strong ...” He can't speak after that, his little body heaving with sobs. It makes Leonardo want to cry too—Dante, so far, had treated their situation like an adventure once they were free of the fire, confident in his brothers' abilities to make things better.

So Leo doesn't leave yet, sitting between his injured brothers and holding Dante on his lap until he starts to calm. He says soothing words and runs a hand through Mikey's hair when he, too, begins to tear up. Donnie is silent, eyes still squeezed shut like it can block out the whole world.

Leo desperately wants sensei to prove Dante right and appear, to rest his hands on Leo's shoulders and tell him not to worry any more. This isn't fair.

His nerves must be hard as granite now, with how much he's pushed down his own feelings for what needs to be done. But he can't put this off and let sensei's spirit wander. He lifts Dante's chin, wipes his brother's tears off it with his hand.

“We're all going to miss sensei a lot,” he says, keeping his voice decently steady. “A horrible thing happened to the city, but he's still watching out for us, right? That's why we kept shrines for our mothers at home, so they could be close. That's just what we have to do for sensei.”

Mikey makes a small, anguished sound. Leo keeps his gaze on Dante because he'll break down if he looks. Dante nods slowly, wiping his eyes again.

“...I still don't want you to go again,” Dante says, holding Leo's wrists. “And I want to see what happened to our house.”

Leonardo is about to deny him again, preparing for the waterworks, when Donnie lifts his head, shifting over to look at Leo.

“Take him with you,” Donnie says. “It's not like Mikey and I can watch him like this, and you can't exactly protect him from what's out there at this point.”

Leo looks around, at the people who are still squatting in this area just like them. The cremation fire is still burning away, and he can see even more in the distance. Donnie is absolutely right.

He relents, letting Dante off his lap and pulling them both to their feet. Donnie is already dozing off by the time they set out, but Mikey is complaining that his burns are beginning to itch, too irritating to sleep.

Satisfied that their brothers won't be disturbed, Leo goes, holding tightly to Dante's hand. He doesn't realize he's essentially been pulling his brother along with his long, adult strides until Dante almost falls over trying to keep up. He slows, though he is desperate to get this over with and really see their house.

Dante says very little on their walk, just looking around and holding tight to Leonardo's hand. Before the bomb, on their walks to school, Dante would chatter on and on about his friends and his classwork. Leo would say little in response and he rarely had to—Dante filled the gap between them seamlessly.

The space between them is filled now by tangible silence. Leo kept Dante's small hand in his as they walked, approaching what used to be their street.

This is where he had stopped the first time, when he had seen the ruins and been unable to approach their house. He can see it now, the debris charred and black. What's left of the houses spills into the street, all charcoal thanks to the fire.

“Everything's gone,” Dante whispers, squeezing Leo's fingers. The house Dante was born in, that Leo himself lived in as long as he can remember. Murakami-san's restaurant next door, where he and his brothers would go and get free bowls of noodles. Their neighbours are probably dead, though a few people are digging through the rubble as they turn the corner.

Leo looks at the spot where their house was. Breathes deeply through his nose.

“Watch out for glass,” is all Leo says as they step through the rubble. Very little has survived—he reaches out to touch a blackened crossbeam and it crumbles under his fingertips. Here and there he can see the remnants of stone shrines, a house's gate. Out of the corner of his eye he sees heart-wrenching, tiny bones under a fence. He steels himself and they cross the threshold of their home.

Dante's eyes are narrowed, as if he's trying to pick out what it used to look like before the bomb, what its layout had been. Leo lets go of his hand so he can begin to pull their house apart, seeking out the spot he knows he abandoned sensei in.

“Don't touch anything,” he snaps as Dante begins to do the same. “You might hurt yourself.”

He isn't surprised to hear Dante turn around and start pulling up beams anyway, but he can't tell him off because suddenly his throat has closed up. Here is sensei.

The bones are where he left them, lying beneath the same crossbeam. Leo feels like he's floating, watching this from overhead as he reaches out for the skull. What's left of his father's hand is near his face, as if it had been covering his eyes. A shudder ripples through him when he picks the skull up, imagining the heat, the smoke ... sensei had always taken pain quietly, but that does nothing to comfort Leo. Gently, he sets his father's skull back down.

He almost jumps out of his skin when he feels a hand on his shoulder, and realizes Dante has come up behind him. Swiftly Leo wipes his eyes, turning to look at his brother. His eyes are bright, staring hard at the scene.

“I wish I stayed with Donnie and Mikey,” Dante says. “It's different, when it's sensei's bones. Not just other people's.”

Leo squeezes Dante's hand, and reaches out to untie Dante's air-raid hood. He had kept it on since that first day, oversized and warm as it was.

“Let's take sensei home,” he says, turning back to the bones.

“We don't have a home, Leo,” Dante says in surprise. “We don't have a city, even.”

Leo doesn't have time to feel the pang from that, numbing his mind and body so he can pick up his father's remains and place them inside the hood. He hadn't realized that sensei's bones would be so small, after what a tall, broad man he had been. Leo tries to picture his face, his hands, as he had been before this.

Where will he even put them? Is there a shrine he can put together from scraps in their city? Their relatives are in America or dead long ago. Leo ties the air-raid hood shut, as tightly as he can. He isn't sure how he'll go on if he drops his father's bones.

He leaves the bundle where it is for now, standing up straight. “You can help me dig now if you want,” he says to Dante. “I'm just going to see if anything is left.” Suddenly a cut or scrape doesn't seem like such a worry. But his brother shakes his head, sitting down gingerly on what's left of their roof.

Leo doesn't press him. He spends a long time trying to clear space, and often failing, but he can pick out where their kitchen used to be, their old bedroom, sensei's room. So many things in those rooms that had been a part of their lives, barely considered.

Very little is left. A chipped bowl from their breakfast, and Leo knows it's Dante's from the charred food left inside; part of the urn that had held Leo's mother, which he places reverently next to the air-raid hood. He looks for the urn belonging to Dante's mother too, but finds nothing. He feels guilty, though Dante tells him it's not his fault.

“You and sensei told me all about her,” Dante says, cutting off Leo's apology. He's still looking at the air-raid hood of bones. “I'll pray to your mother's urn for her too.”

He's given up on finding anything else when his fingers find a metal box, in what used to be their father's room. He's immediately curious: sensei's room has always been off-limits for his privacy, but Leo has memories of peeking into the doorway with Raphael and seeing this box, on a shelf next to his bedroll.

It's locked, of course, and Leo isn't about to pry it open right here. He's ashamed to realize that he's hoping it's just stuffed with money, a last gift from his dead father to keep them afloat.

It's getting late, so he decides looking any longer won't bring up more than memories. Dante's eyelids are drooping so he lets him climb on his back, holding tightly to his rice bowl and the remainder of the urn. Leo holds the bundle of bones and the box close to his chest. Literally all that is left of his father, in his arms.

By the time they're turning the corner towards the relief area, Dante's chin is resting against Leo's shoulders and Leo's feet drag against the ground. He has another, momentary panic until he spots his brothers where he left them, half-hidden by bamboo. Carefully, he sets Dante down.

They seem left alone back here, though a few other people are milling around in the bamboo as well for shelter. Both of them are sleeping and Leo is grateful—he didn't want to see their faces when he returned with an armful of bones.

He sits cross-legged at his brothers' feet, and Dante collapses next to him, leaning heavily against his side. Leo doesn't bother to wait for dark, or even lie down.

He puts one arm around his smallest brother, and the other curls protectively around his father's remains. He sleeps cross-legged and sitting up.

* * *

 

“Leonardo.”

Leo's eyes snap open and he almost leaps to his feet, crying out in surprise. He doesn't recognize that voice, and the figure in front of him scrambles backwards.

As he shifts, sensei's bones rattle together and Leo gives a horrified cry at the sound, holding the hood closer to his front. He sees Dante sitting up out of the corner of his eye—he must have moved to lie down after Leo fell asleep—and hears Donnie groan faintly, stirring behind them.

The figure's hands are out in front of him, protectively. “Leonardo! It's alright! It hasn't been that long since we've seen each other!”

Leo really looks then, and realizes who he almost kicked in the stomach. A tall, wide-eyed man, boyish despite his height and his age.

“Usagi?” he asks, disbelieving. The son of sensei's old friend, a frequent visitor before the war got bad. There is no way Usagi walked all this way for them, or would have remembered them in this chaos. Leo's family hasn't seen him since his father died last year.

Dante jumps up beside him, mouth wide open. “What are you doing here?” he exclaims. “You live in Kure! Did it get bombed too?”

Usagi shakes his head, but in seconds his eyes are taking in everything—Leo's wounded brothers wincing awake, their ragged clothes ... the bundle in Leo's lap, where part of sensei's skull is visible. His expression drops as he shares a pained look with Leonardo, before collecting himself and standing up.

Leo sets the bones aside carefully to join him, wincing at the cramp from sleeping sitting up. He tries to ignore how Mikey, barely awake, bites his trembling lip when he sees them, poking through where the hood doesn't cover.

Usagi is blinking suspiciously hard, but his voice is clear when he speaks. “I was giving up hope on finding you. When I saw your street ...”

“Finding us?” Donnie says, on the ground. He's sitting up, rubbing away tears with one hand and looking pointedly away from the bones. “You didn't seriously come from Kure to look for us, did you?”

Kure is to the east, a day trip from their childhoods that Leo thinks of when he's at his hungriest or unhappiest. Usagi would show Leo the family's samurai swords, passed down for generations, and even let Leonardo hold the wakizashi. The memory feels buried under rubble, impossible to pull out.

“I've been looking for my wife's brother,” Usagi says, clearly taking in Mikey and Donnie's injuries. Next to tidy Usagi, come straight from the real world, they look even more worrying.

Leo can't help but feel a disappointed ache, though he isn't surprised. Leo has thought of no one else but his own family since that morning. He can't expect even their friends to make him and his brothers their first choice.

Usagi must notice Leo's expression because his eyes soften, and he claps a hand onto Leo's shoulder. “Don't think I'd forgotten you, Leonardo. You know the importance of family—and I know my brother-in-law's fate after meeting some of his coworkers,” he adds, more softly.

“I'm sorry,” says Leo, and means it. He remembers Usagi's brother-in-law too, a severe man who was living with them to reach his job in Hiroshima. He had disliked sensei, but Leo still feels a pang of sadness knowing this bomb has killed someone else he knew. Countless people, if he really thinks about it: neighbours, classmates, coworkers. He's been trying not to think about it.

“I'm sorry too,” Usagi says. He glances toward the air-raid hood, apparently unable to look away, and Leo realizes that he might think two people are in that tangle of bones.

“My father is dead,” he says in a soft, steady voice. “Raphael joined the army, so I'm hoping he can come back to us soon.”

There's great sadness in Usagi's face, but relief too—they've always been close, Leo and his brothers. Sensei's loss is still a gaping wound, but thinking of the five of them together again ... it feels survivable.

“I need to leave him a message in our neighbourhood,” Leo adds. “So he knows where we are.” He needs to think about housing, or something like it ... he's sure he can pull some metal scraps together to make a shack, and when Raph finds them they can finally leave this place and find work to look after their brothers.

Usagi is quiet, stepping back to look them up and down. Leo is glad to see him here, but he's embarrassed, knowing that they look no different than the rest of these Hiroshima ghosts. He's about to say he had better get going, to leave the message, when Usagi speaks.

“Why don't you come home with me?” he asks, like it's just a day out to visit. “It's just my wife, my son and I in that big house. Leave a note saying you're safe in Kure with us and I'm sure it will ease his worries.”

Leo stares—then shakes his head, disbelieving. “I couldn't ... we couldn't impose on you like this. It's too much, Usagi-san, I--”

Usagi shakes his head, and suddenly he looks very stern. Remarkably like sensei, actually. “I insist. You're lucky you all survived and your father would want you to stay that way. He would do the same for my son.”

Leo is about to protest, but he looks at his brothers again, really seeing them. Donnie's exhaustion, Mikey's burns, Dante's small dirty face. Donnie is doing a good job of smoothing his expression, but Mikey and Dante are clearly feeling otherwise, looking slack-jawed at Usagi. Dante tugs Leo's arm.

“I heard a soldier say nothing will grow here for 75 years,” he says, eyes round and serious. “The bomb ruined the earth. How are we gonna eat if we stay here?”

“Oh! Hold on,” Usagi says, reaching into his shoulder bag at Dante's question. Leo is grateful for the distraction, because he had no answer for his brother.

Usagi pulls out three rice balls and a skein of water. “These were lunch, but I can eat when we get home. Please, boys. It would be my pleasure to have you as my guests.”

Leo takes the food and finally relents, nodding his head. He doesn't eat, but makes sure his brothers finish every bite before they all take long drinks of water. Usagi disappears briefly, finally returning with a military handcart he must have begged off of the soldiers. Donatello still can't walk and they help him into it, Usagi pushing it along. With Mikey's arm slung over Leo's shoulder and Dante close beside them, they leave the relief area for good. Sensei's bones sit in Donnie's lap, clinking with every bump in the road.

When they get close to their old neighbourhood, Leo sits his brothers at the end of the street, pulling at debris in an effort to find something he can write on. He finally finds a metal sheet and grabs a burnt stick sticking out of a house. His kanji are messy, but readable enough:

RAPHAEL:  
YOUR BROTHERS SAFE IN KURE WITH MIYAMOTOS, AUGUST 10 1945.  
\- LEONARDO

Leo sets his makeshift sign over what used to be their house, hoping it can stay where it belongs long enough for Raph to come back. He feels his brothers' eyes on him as he steadies it with some wood. It should be enough information, and there isn't room for more. He feels awful that this is all he can leave for his brother, and how long will it be before he can even leave to find them? Leo has not thought very hard about this, or about the impending invasion of Japan.

Maybe Usagi won't even let them stay long enough for his message to be relevant. Leo sighs and turns back to his brothers. There are more pressing problems.

They walk slowly and quietly to the nearest train station, and amazingly the line is running—though that is something Leo should have expected, since Usagi got to Hiroshima clean. Usagi is rummaging for fare money when Leo flashes his disaster certificate, and the soldier waves them onto the train without trouble. It's full of refugees, and people like Usagi, returning to Kure for the night. Leo only realizes then that it's getting late, the shadows growing long across the fields.

A young woman, well-dressed, gives Mikey and Dante each a cinnamon heart not long after they board the train. Dante stares at his for awhile, awed by the sight of candy, before Mikey threatens to eat his too if it's not in his mouth soon.

Kure platform is a mess of refugees, relief teams and soldiers, and Leo and Usagi barely manage to herd all of them, and their cart, off of it and towards the direction of Usagi's home. Leo holds tightly to sensei's bones with one arm, and Dante's hand with the other as they navigate the crowd. Mikey's good hand trembles where it clutches to the cart.

People stare in disbelief as they go, and Leo finds himself staring back. He dares them with his eyes to say a word against him or his brothers. Dante sticks his tongue out at one woman whose head turns as they head down a nice street. It's stained red from the candy, but Leo is reminded more of blood.

It's worse because Usagi's neighbourhood is quite good, better than theirs at home. His house has escaped the smaller raids, and Leo doesn't even want to cross the threshold with his filthy, bloodied body. They don't belong here, in this fine neighbourhood and clean house.

Usagi goes in first, touching Leo's shoulder as he slides his door open. They can see him down the hall, speaking to the woman who has met him in the hall—Mariko, his wife. They speak briefly, and Usagi hugs her for a long moment. Leo remembers then that he went to Hiroshima for his brother-in-law ... not four dirty, starving boys, whom he hasn't seen in months.

Eventually they come to the door, and Usagi gestures for them to come in. His wife's eyes are red, but she smiles at them anyway. Leo remembers her as very kind, and he hopes wartime has not hardened her too much.

“My husband tells me you have no place to stay,” she says, her voice barely wavering. “He's told me terrible things about Hiroshima. You're welcome here as long as you need it.”

Usagi's son is standing in a further doorway, jaw slack at the appearance of Leo and his brothers. Mariko softly shoos him away.

“Why don't you go and put bedrolls in the spare room for our good friends, Jotaro?” she asks him, like they're here for a weekend visit. “You remember playing with Dante, don't you?”

The little boy nods, waving shyly at Dante before darting off again.

Leo is pleased and grateful that Mariko remembers them so well, and a little guilty—he has not thought very hard about their old friends at all since their last visit. The war getting closer, hiding extra ration cards, Raph running away ... there had been too many things keeping his attention before the bomb. It feels like years.

They step inside, Leo helping Donnie out of the cart and into the main part of the house. Usagi asks gently if he may take sensei's bones and put them at the shrine, and momentarily Leo is horrified, balking at the idea of anyone else touching his father. Mikey touches the inside of Leo's elbow and he relents, transferring the bundle to Usagi's waiting arms. He knows they will get there safely, that he can pray to sensei later, but the reaction is still fresh when Mariko motions to the next room.

“I'm going to find you fresh clothes,” she says. “Leave the old ones on the porch after your bath.”

In the clean, bright streets of Kure they are quite a sight, filthy and smelling of sweat and fire and blood. Mikey's burns in particular are horrifying, compared to the clean, real softness of the people here. They're all dressed in blackened rags, and Leo doesn't even want their feet to dirty the tatami mats as he helps his brothers into the next room. Already he feels spoiled, undeserving of all these resources.

He helps Donnie and Mikey sit, and they sigh in relief at the softness of the mats beneath them. Dante is peeking out into the hallway and Leo pulls him back as Mariko returns, pulling a tub in with her. Leo glances inside and sees soap, oils, a large rice pot. Four white robes for sleeping in, towels and cloths, all neatly folded.

“There's a little heater in the corner,” Mariko says, laying these things neatly beside the tub. “The pump is just outside the door here, and there are bedrolls in the adjacent room. If you need extra come and fetch me, and—Jotaro, get to bed,” she adds sharply, and her son leaves the doorway and dashes back down the hall. “Do you need any help with the bath?” she asks, clearly thinking of their injuries.

Leo does not know what to say, though he shakes his head at her offer of help. This generosity is too much, imperial luxury after the burned husk that is Hiroshima. He only nods, bowing awkwardly before reaching for the supplies.

His brothers react for him, Dante and Michelangelo chorusing arigatou gozaimasu and Dante flashing Mariko a charming smile. It flushes her cheeks and she smiles back, touching Leo's shoulder.

“I'll be along with day clothes in the morning,” she says. “Our room is down the hall if you need something.”

“Thank you,” Leo says finally, then again. “Thank you. That'll be fine.” Donnie nods and gives her a weak smile. Mariko returns it briefly, before closing the shoji screen softly behind her.

Leonardo looks at himself and his filthy, wounded brothers, and thinks of his own nausea and unsteady feet. He finds the heater and starts a little fire in it, setting Dante to work filling pots of water for him to warm. This will be slow going to bathe all four of them, but it might aggravate their various injuries and sicknesses to share the bath water like at home. That's what he tells himself, at least, to feel less guilty for using so much water from someone else's pump.

Donnie is first, so Leo helps him shuck off his clothes and step into the warm water. His brother closes his eyes and Leo sets to work, gently cleaning the worst of his cuts, Donnie's swollen ankle.

He only cries out once, when Leo swipes his thigh with the cloth and doesn't realize that Donnie's side is still full of glass. It takes some time for them to pick out the worst of it and pile it on the porch, before Leo can get the dirt and blood from his brother's hair and finally help him into a towel, which Dante is shaking open in anticipation to be of help.

“Look at that water,” Mikey says, grinning widely. It's a sickly grey, full of ash and god-knows-what from their days of hell. Leo has to run his hands under the pump before he can even touch a robe for Donnie to sleep in.

“Bet your water is worse,” Donnie replies as Leo smooths out a bedroll. He grins as he says it, the first smile since that bombed morning, but he's still shivering with fever as Leonardo tucks him in. He's asleep in minutes, soothed by the dark quiet of the adjoining room and the soft covers.

Leo dumps out the water and repeats the long process for Mikey, who cries when his burns hit the heat. Dante drops down right next to him as Leo sponges at them with the cloth, leaning his cheek against Mikey's good arm as Leo chants I'm sorry, I'm sorry and tries to pull up the grime and leave the skin where it belongs.

It takes longer to get Mikey clean with his break and his wounds, but he looks much more like himself when it's through. He hopes Mariko doesn't mind too much that he's torn one of her towels, to sling up Mikey's arm before dressing him and tucking him in next to Donatello.

“Feels so much better,” Mikey whispers in the dark, and Leo hopes he doesn't decide to die here, comfortable at last despite his injuries and unsteadiness. He's reluctant to step back into the bigger room and leave the two of them, when they look so vulnerable where they sleep.

Dante stops Leo as he begins to undress him for the next batch of water, eyes raking Leo's frame. “You don't want to go next?” he asks. “I can wait. I'll help you wash your hair.”

Leo smiles and shakes his head. “I'm the big brother,” he says, pulling off what's left of Dante's school uniform. “You're all the little brothers. That's just the way it works. The eldest brother has to make sure everyone is taken care of first.”

Dante nods in understanding, expression serious, and allows Leo to help him into the tub and help him wash. Leo is shocked to find glass tangled in his brother's hair and sticking in his scalp—but it was too much to ask for him to escape from injury completely. He'll have to cut Dante's hair tomorrow to get out the rest, it's so matted. Dante makes small sounds of pain as his brother works but doesn't protest.

“I want to stay up with you,” Dante protests as Leo gets him ready for bed, ushering him toward the smaller room. “I'll help you take your bath!”

“You'll want to sleep as soon as you hit the pillow,” Leo promises, and he's right—Dante's eyelids droop almost as soon as he's tucked in, and he curls up close against Donatello. Leonardo sits with him, pushes Dante's bangs off his face until he drops off completely.

Only then does Leo warm up water for himself, lay out clothes and a towel for his own comfort before undressing and sinking into the water. He sighs with relief at the heat. It's the best thing he's ever felt, steaming and all-encompassing like a wet embrace. He doesn't even scrub for awhile, letting himself relax and just bask in the hot water, a tub half-full all to himself. He can't believe his good luck at what Mariko and Usagi have provided. He actually smiles, sinking past his shoulders into the heat, feeling embraced and content and--

\--choking, lungs full of smoke as he runs, the heat of the flames closing them in and making him want to collapse. His brothers are depending on him, but he can't go on, not without sensei, not when sensei is burning to death--

Leo's eyes snap open, and he has to grip the tub's edges to stop himself from scrambling out and away from the bath. He can't ruin Mariko's mats after all she's done for them, though now he shakes as he reaches for the soap, forcing himself to scrub away his grime. His hands are shaking hard.

He's exhausted by the time he steps out, knowing he hasn't gotten all the glass and splinters himself. There's nothing to be done about it, and Leo spends almost five minutes just shivering in his towel on the tatami, biting his lip hard to keep from crying. Being able to wash himself, his brothers finally safe in the next room, has made him feel everything for the first time. Nothing else depends on Leonardo right now, except to get well. He can finally grieve.

He cries, naked on the mats, cries for sensei and his mother and Raphael as he bites his lip to keep himself from waking the others. It isn't fair, that the others were all so hurt and so young, so it fell to Leo to keep the family together and get ready for Raph's arrival. Raph could have helped him! Sensei could have gone through their home and brought back their possessions, tell Leo if he had hidden any money to keep them from starving to death. His mother could have bathed them all instead, stroked their hair. Leo even cries for Atsuko, Dante's mother, remembering how she'd learned to make their favourite meals and laid their uniforms out every morning. How she'd even tried to favour prickly Raph, to get around his dislike of her in small ways.

It takes him ages to calm back down. He finally shucks off his towel to climb into his robe and then dump out the water, almost getting ready to boil more before he remembers he was last. It's not his parent's fault that they died, he reminds himself. It's not Atsuko's fault she left Dante motherless too. And Raph...

...maybe Leo would have never found Raph in the rubble. Maybe he would have died alone, burned and blind, if he hadn't run away. Leo wipes his eyes with his wrist. He needs Raph, needs him to come home and help him get through this.

He lies down next to Dante and is about to close his eyes, when his youngest brother rolls over to press himself against Leo. Leo blinks in surprise, but reacts, pressing his lips against Dante's forehead anyway.

“You're not asleep?” he whispers.

“I heard you crying,” Dante says. “Don't cry, Leo. We're gonna be okay.”

That makes him want to start all over again, but he holds it in and pulls Dante close instead. “You're right,” he agrees, voice thick. “Go back to sleep.”

Dante obeys, but Leonardo lies awake for a long time, listening to the soft breaths of his brothers and wondering if Raph can't sleep either.

* * *

 

Leo sleeps late for the first time in six years, curled protectively around Dante and allowing Mariko to bring them all a meal. And the meal is downright luxurious for wartime—ochazuke, tea on rice with thick pieces of black market salmon and bamboo flakes. This had been Raph's favourite before the war made meat scarce, and as Leo eats he remembers Raph's protests at how it wasn't the same without good meat or vegetables. Sensei had always chastised him, because they had been lucky to have enough to feed six people at all.

Mikey and Donnie can sit up to eat, but they only get through less than half of their food, letting Dante devour the rest. This makes Leo's stomach twist with worry—they haven't eaten or drank since Usagi's packed lunch.

Mariko comes back halfway through their meal to bandage them properly, something Leo realizes he forgot to do. He's ashamed, but realizes he would have done it poorly anyway when he sees Mariko gently sponging Mikey's burns, putting on an ointment in the worst places before neatly bandaging the whole wound. Mikey and Donnie go right to sleep after this attention, and Leo wants to cry from how grateful he is. He must owe the Miyamotos countless yen already, in room and board and clothes. And he can't pay back kindness.

He gets himself and Dante dressed to return their dishes later, bowing deeply in his thanks to Usagi. Leo is waved off, as if it was a minor kindness between friends.

“I owe it to our fathers,” Usagi says at Leo's protest. “They were friends in America and they were friends here—how can I leave you all to fend for yourselves like this?” He gestures towards their room. “I'll help you find work when you're well, but you aren't yet. Rest and wait for Raphael.”

These people must be angels, Leo thinks. Good spirits, to balance out all of the horror and pain they have experienced already.

Behind them, he can already hear Jotaro and Dante chasing each other, laughing and whooping down the halls before Mariko hushes them and orders them outside. Leo smiles in spite of himself. At least one of his brothers is still thriving.

He doesn't argue with Usagi any longer, not even when Usagi says they can keep the radio for the next few days. Leo's head is aching badly and his nausea is coming back, so he lets Dante keep playing and returns to bed. His brothers have gone back to sleep, looking small under their covers.

Leo lies down, radio playing quietly as he drifts in and out of strange dreams. At some point he learns that a second atomic bomb—that's what they're called—fell on Nagasaki two days ago, when he and Mikey were staggering back to the relief station. He falls back into a restless sleep, only waking again when Dante crawls back into bed later and whispers goodnight.

The next few days are strange. Leo has not been ill in a very long time, and he doesn't understand how he and his brothers seem to be even weaker now that they are out of Hiroshima. Only Dante seems to be recovering, with the glass cut from his his hair by Mariko and her good food in his stomach. Leo rests easy when it comes to Dante, now. Kure is too small to be bombed again, and Usagi's family have a concrete, private shelter if the need does arise. And his youngest brother sticks close to the house, playing with Jotaro till sundown in the front yard. Mostly Leo, Mikey and Donnie sleep.

At one point he hears Mariko and Usagi speaking, in low voices just outside the bedroom.

“...a miracle,” he hears Mariko say. “The fact that they all got out, after what you told me. But they really need a doctor to keep them alive.”

Donnie is awake too, and he and Leonardo exchange a frightened look before closing their eyes again, returning to restless sleep. If he is being truthful, Leo no longer minds the thought of dying all that much. He could be with with his parents again for eternity, without this constant dulled panic. Die comfortable in bed and not in flames.

But his brothers need him. He can't let Raph find them to even less.

On August 15th, the war ends for good, and Leo actually gets out of bed to listen to the Emperor's broadcast. Sensei had hated the imperial system, but Leonardo is still fascinated by such a powerful voice, speaking to all of Japan from his palace and asking them to come together. He listens intently, struggling to follow the Imperial dialect.

“Endure the unendurable,” the Emperor tells them, and Leo thinks that will be easy, when his family has already gone above and beyond in that department.

Nobody in this house is particularly affected by surrender, not like the people silent in the streets or the weeping of the radio announcer after the Emperor's broadcast ends.

“I knew we would lose,” Usagi says as he walks with Leo back to bed. He is almost matter-of-fact about it. “I was hoping it would be earlier, but shikata ga nai, Leonardo. It can't be helped.”

“What did it say?” Donnie asks when Leo lies back down again. The pinpricks of red and purple Leo found on his neck that second day have grown, and he's frighteningly pale. Mikey's soft curls are thinning on his head, and they wake up each day with more hair on his pillow. He's awake too, watching Leo with his wide, bright eyes.

Leo huffs softly as he settles back in. “To all come together and survive what's to come,” he says. “It shouldn't be very hard for us to do after all this.”

“Have you heard anything from Raph yet?” asks Donnie, brow creased with worry.

“I would tell you as soon as I did,” Leo says, eyes already closed. “Go back to sleep, okay? Doctor's coming tomorrow.”

Donnie is quiet for a moment, and Leo is almost sure he's fallen asleep again when he says, “I think this new bomb causes sickness as well the acute injuries.”

“Oh?” Leo says, almost asleep.

“I mean, we can't know for sure, but with such a wide radius of destruction, and the heat flash, and taking into account how sick we all still are ... well, it's a possibility, don't you think? The Americans must have been planning something.”

“A lot of people were just dropping dead,” Mikey says suddenly. His voice has an uncharacteristic tinge to it that makes Leo uneasy. “On Ninoshima people would come in and not be hurt at all, but they'd die really badly in a few hours. They'd be bleeding from their mouth and nose for just no reason.” His voice cracks. “I really thought it would happen to me, too ... maybe we're all gonna have that happen.”

Donnie runs a comforting hand through Mikey's hair, and Leo says, “No, Mikey. We're probably all just sick from the bad air in the city. And Dante's just fine! Just wait until the doctor.”

This is the first they've heard about Mikey's two days apart from them, and Leo wonders if they'll ever hear the rest. Imagining what he went through alone leaves his stomach in knots.

The worst is when they vomit, whatever little they've eaten, and Leo has to dump the bucket out with the waste. It makes him want to throw up all over again, but he refuses to let someone else clean it up.

Dante eats with Usagi and his family now. Leonardo gets up long enough to see the doctor arrive. Dante realizes what's coming right away, trying to bolt out the door in escape.

“I don't want to,” Dante cries as Usagi catches him around the waist. Dante has always hated the doctor and this one is a severe looking man. Leo wouldn't blame him in the least, if their situation wasn't so dire. He gives Usagi a thankful look and keep Dante's hand tight in his for the rest of that morning.

“Here are third degree burns,” the doctor says later, pointing at the reddest place on Michelangelo's shoulder. “He's lucky these aren't full of maggots.”

“Maggots?” Leo says in disbelief. Dante makes a disgusted noise next to him, and Leo tightens his grip on his wrist.

“Summer heat,” is the doctor's only response as he wraps Mikey back up. Leo doesn't fail to notice the gentleness of his bandaging, and it reassures him somewhat that this fearsome man can control this. “Keep these covered and the flies will stay off.”

It turns out that Mikey's arm is not severely broken, better than Leonardo expected, but difficult to set under those burns after more than a week untreated. The doctor does the best he can, but warns Michelangelo that his arm may not get its full use back. Mikey, unusually quiet after hearing all this, only nods as he listens intently.

Leo is surprised to learn that he was burned after all, on his scalp and the back of his neck. It had gone unnoticed all this time, but it is not nearly as bad as Mikey's and so he's instructed only to keep it clean and cool. His and Donatello's cuts are too late to stitch up, and Donnie's ankle is recovering with little help.

The doctor's biggest worry is their illness, and he doesn't say anything Leo is excited about hearing. “People from Hiroshima keep getting ill this way. I wish I could help you more, but I can't. Just keep resting until you start to improve.”

He barely looks at Dante when Leo reminds him to check his last brother, only examining the cuts on his scalp and saying he looks fine otherwise. Dante is clearly relieved at the lack of attention, sticking close to Leo as the doctor leaves.

They don't talk after that. Mariko brings them light, easy food and Dante goes off to play. The rest of them go back to sleep.

It's almost another week before Leo feels somewhat like himself again, and by then he and Mikey have both lost almost all of their hair, Leo's coming off all at once one day when he decides to pull a comb through it. He doesn't understand why Donnie, just as sick, has kept most of his.

Mikey jokes and teases about their two shiny bald heads, but Leo is upset—Mikey's wavy hair had been like their mother's. He wonders if this sickness will even let it grow back.

Leo finally gets up and feels close to better, wobbly on his feet but no longer nauseated. Mikey is starting to recover too, eating full meals with Leo in their room on Leo's first day up. His burns are still a worrying, slowly healing mass on his skin that he wants the doctor to check on, though Mikey promises him they hurt less now.

The second day on his feet, Leo goes to the house shrine.

He feels guilty, that he nearly forgot, but all he could do for so long was sleep off his illness and try to get his energy back. He knows sensei will forgive him for being late.

He kneels in front of their shrine, much finer than the one lost at home. Sensei's bones and his mother's urn are sitting on a shelf, untouched since the night they arrived. Someone has lit incense for them alongside the family's dead, and Leo is touched as he lights a stick of his own.

He folds his hands and prays, quietly. His parent's faces are fading already without pictures, and he hopes again that something has survived inside the old metal box. He's waiting for Raph before he opens it up.

“We all really miss you,” he says finally, out loud. “I'm sorry, Father. I'm doing my best, but I'm so ... I'm afraid. Wherever you are, send us some more good luck.”

He's glad he, at least, is on the road to recovery, because he needs to find a new job to pay back the Miyamotos and support his brothers. Maybe he can even make enough to pay school fees for his brothers ... maybe not all four of them, but if he and Raph do it together ...

He looks hopelessly at the shrine. Gives his father one more blessing, and returns to his brothers.

* * *

 

“Lucky again,” Dr. Nakazawa says, as he puts fresh wrappings on Michelangelo's chest. Leo expects to be seeing him often, with how slowly his brother's wounds are healing. “A lot more people are suddenly getting sick and dying, but I guess you all had it mild. I expect your hair will grow back soon.”

“Sounds good! We can get some fancy American conditioner for our flowing locks,” Mikey says, grinning wide. He's cheerful again, much closer to his joking old self. Leo needs to remind him to pay attention to the doctor's orders.

Donnie is finally almost better, nearly a week after Leo's first shrine visit, and they are all relieved. He'd been so sick and so exhausted since the first day and had just lingered, and when the vomiting had been at its worst Leo had sometimes been sure they would really lose him. Right now he's looking at the progress of Mikey's burns intently, watching the careful way the doctor bandages him up again.

Dante is thriving so well that Leo has not even bothered to pull him from his play. When Jotaro is at school he's in the garden, or by the river down the street, where he watches the American occupiers crossing the bridge into town.

It's the end of August, and Leo is sitting in the yard enjoying the sun. Donnie is reading one of Usagi's books nearby and Mikey is snoozing, while Dante and Jotaro kick a cloth ball back and forth. Mariko is folding laundry on the porch. It would be a sweet family scene if not for the circumstances, if not for how much Leo and his brothers don't belong.

He's thinking guiltily about how they are sucking dear resources from this family in their long recovery, sitting in this sunny yard while other people are starving in the rubble back home ...

He sees Jotaro pause, pointing to something down the street. Leo closes his eyes. He'll nap this afternoon and enjoy the time outside with his brothers. When the work week starts again tomorrow, he'll go out and start looking for a job in earnest—maybe Usagi can direct him to a factory, or a building site now that the reconstruction efforts are beginning.

Leo looks again when he hears Dante gasp, and Mikey cry out a little in surprise. Worried, he sits up again to get a better look.

There is Raphael, in the courtyard.

He's thinner than when he left in June, an ill-fitting uniform starting to pull apart at the seams. But he's whole, without any burns or deep cuts filled with glass.

Raph's eyes dart around at them, and Leo can see how wild they are now. He stands up slowly, because Raph like this, after weeks alone and searching, will be volatile, and—

“Raphie!” Leo's thoughts are cut off by Mikey jumping up, and running towards their brother to embrace him. Thank every higher power for Michelangelo and his endless well of forgiveness, his eagerness just to see Raph's face again.

Raph looks stunned. His arms are shaky as he wraps his arms around his brother, and doesn't even respond to the childhood nickname.

Suddenly Leo can't hear the neighbourhood sounds, or even his own breathing. His senses have been tunneled, so there's only Raph, a presence he's silently begged for and raged at all at once.

Mikey lets go gingerly, clearly wincing at the pain from such a tight hug. Leo sees Raphael's eyes widen when he sees the bandages peeking out from Mikey's shirt collar.

“Raph--” Leo says, straightening up.

“Where's sensei?” Raph says. His voice is hoarse, different from how Leo remembers. But maybe there's too many memories now, a buffer between when he last heard Raph speak and the remains of Hiroshima.

Mikey looks away, biting his lip, and Leo sees Dante stiffen up. The entire yard is waiting for the result of this, holding their breath.

“Raph,” Leo says again. He takes a few tentative steps forward. “I'm sorry. He didn't make it.”

Raph shakes his head, almost imperceptibly. For a moment Leo is surprised—Raph's emotions are not usually so contained, but they are roiling, under the surface of his brother's skin.

“I know that,” he says. “He wasn't—you wouldn't forget, you'd have put him on the sign. Where's his body?”

Mikey makes a soft, sad noise, which Leo tries to ignore. He points inside instead. “The shrine.”

“Okay,” Raph says, still in that husky voice that isn't his. “Okay, I just ... I needed to make sure.” He looks around, counting to make sure that, yes, there are four living bodies here. Then his shoulders slump. His voice cracks. “God. I thought you'd all burned to death and I'd be alone.”

Leo only shakes his head, and finally walks up to Raph and embraces him. His brother's grip is desperate around his shoulders. He can imagine what Raph must have felt, seeing the explosion from outside the city and then coming back, to endless corpses and unrecognizable people.

“I shouldn't have left,” Raph says, muffled in Leo's shoulder. “If I'd have known--”

“How could you have known?” Leo says, voice soft. He's done so much comforting now that he should sick of it, but it's the big brother instinct in him, to keep everyone comfortable and knowing they are loved. “Don't think about it right now. I'm glad you're back.”

If Raph had been with them, maybe he would have died downtown on a mobilization like Leo's coworkers and Mikey's classmates. Maybe he would have been home, and Leo would not have been able to dig him out. They had worried about him so long, and the army had seemed so dangerous a place to be. But it had kept him safe and whole.

Leo finally pulls away, and Raph wipes furiously at his eyes with his sleeve and thumps Leo hard on the back. Then Donnie and Dante are there too, and Raphael pulls them in, and Mariko stands up to invite them inside.

“Welcome home, Raphael,” she says, and Raph nods in thanks, though they all know this place isn't home and will never be. It is still a kind thing to say, something not even Raph can balk at.

Dante tugs at Raph's sleeve and for the first time he smiles, draping an arm around their youngest brother's shoulders and pulling him tight against his side—captively tight, like Raph's teasing before, so Dante squeals and sticks his arms out straight trying to get away. Mikey laughs out loud, and it almost feels normal.

At dinner the five of them eat in their room, though lately they have joined the Miyamotos in the main part of the house. Raphael sits between Leo and Mikey and finishes his portion, but doesn't take seconds, though there's plenty. He is quiet throughout the meal as the others talk, about how good it is to be together again and how lucky it was that Usagi brought them here and Raph could find them. Raph is almost docile throughout all this, and Leo knows that means an explosion is imminent.

“What did you do in the war while you were gone?” Dante asks, downing his third bowl of rice. He has eaten well since they got here.

“Nothing in the war. Lots of training and stuff,” Raph says. “The biggest thing I did was help people who were leaving Hiroshima after the bomb. I put out mats for them to lie down on and got supplies.”

Dante is muffled, a big bite of food in his mouth. “Did you look for us?”

Raph nods, very serious. “Everyone that came in I looked at really hard. Nobody was as ugly as you guys, though.”

Dante gasps, and the rest of them laugh. It feels so good to laugh together over a meal again, even over this. But Raph is still quiet other than this, no visible anger or even a bad mood. Just this quiet shakiness.

They clear up the dishes together to be washed, and Leo tells Dante he can stay up as late as he likes. Pleased, Dante runs off to find Jotaro—he'll be disappointed, since his friend has school tomorrow. He exchanges a worried look with Mikey, who has stuck close to Raph all evening. Leo had hoped his sunny presence would help Raph feel more normal, but it doesn't seem to have worked very well.

Afterwards, Leo takes Raph to the shrine.

It takes Raph a moment to find sensei, still wrapped in the hood, and it's clear he is looking for an urn at first.

When he does finally notice, his shoulders stiffen up, the way sensei's used to when he was upset about something. He takes a few steps forward, fingers shaky as he opens the hood, runs his thumb over the top of the skull. Leo bites his lip.

Then Raph drops to the floor and wails, a sound that cuts into Leo like a knife and makes him drop down too, grabbing his brother's shoulders. Raph looks at him, eyes wild.

“The kids are in bed, Raph,” Leo says, hoping he sounds reasonably calm. “You can't--”

“I can! And I will!” Raph spits at him, voice shaking. He shoves Leo away, covers his eyes with his hands, and Leo is afraid that this has driven him to madness.

He cries there, and Leo knows the rest of the house can hear his wracking sobs, that Jotaro and Dante are probably awake and huddled in their bedrolls. But they won't come near this brother right now. They'll let the wild animal grieve in peace.

“All I ever did was fight with him,” Raph chokes out. He turns to look at Leo, pulling his hands away, and his face is a mess of tears and snot already. “I-I never listened to him, and he still talked to me and let me stay there! He wrote me letters after I left,” Raph says, soft. Then he's crying again.

Leo has never seen him this way before. Raph has cried before, in private, hatefully telling Leo not to let anyone else know, but this is visceral, cutting grief. Raph is not used to feeling this way, and Leo is not equipped to help him. Not this time.

“Raphael,” Leo says, in the gentle voice he thought he'd lost when Dante left toddlerhood. “He knew you didn't mean it. He didn't hold anything against you, he--”

“But I did mean it,” Raph says, gasping the words. “I meant every word, Leo! I just, I ...” His shoulders give another great shake. “I thought I would come home a hero, or I'd at least die out there and not have to deal with it. I want to talk to him. Just once more, Leo, but he fucking burned to death!”

Leo lets him cry, leaving his hand on Raph's shoulder.

“Fuck you,” Raph manages after awhile, sitting up and wiping his eyes. “Don't tell the others I lost it, I just ...ugh. God.”

Leo doesn't say that they've already heard him, though it's tempting. “I won't. It's okay, Raph.”

“It's not and you know it,” Raph snaps. Leo feels a sudden wave of guilt. If he just been able to dig out sensei, their family would at least be whole. He and Raphael could discuss all these years of arguments, and Leo could relax slightly about keeping the family afloat.

But that isn't how life is going to be, and he's done well accepting it so far.

“I'm sorry,” Leo says after a moment. He's looking at the floor now, unable to meet either Raph's gaze or that of the skull on the shrine, peeking out from under the cloth. “He's dead because I couldn't dig him out of the house. I—I found Donnie and Dante, but he was stuck under this huge crossbeam ...”

He looks up, and Raph has stopped crying, looking at him hard. Leo braces himself.

“Leo,” he says. “I ... okay. The Americans dropped that thing. Not you. And if you weren't here, I don't know ... I don't know,” he says, and his face is in his hands again.

“I can't be mad at you,” he chokes through his fingers. “I thought you were all dead, Leonardo, I went home for all your bones ... but you're not. I don't think I could hold that against you, when it's not your fault.”

That is ... profound, almost, for Raphael. It is relieving for Leo, at least, to know that his brother doesn't hold it against him that he couldn't save sensei. Though Leo still holds it against himself.

He pulls his brother to his feet. “We should go to bed.”

Raph runs his hand over his head, nodding, then slinging his arm around Leo's shoulder.

“We'll have to find jobs,” Raph says, as they walk back. “We can't take too much more charity, and the kids need to be in school.”

“Yeah,” Leo says. Raph ought to finish school too, sensei would have wanted that. “But let's not think about that now.”

All he wants to think about is how nice it will be, for the five of them to sleep in a room together again. When they get back, Donnie is still awake, reading, and he and Leo exchange a glance as they get ready for bed. They don't mention what the others must have heard, just down the hall.

“Now I can sleep next to you,” Raph says, eyelids drooping. “Instead of by your feet like in that tiny room at home. Donnie used to kick, ugh.”

Leo smiles.

* * *

 

The next day, Leo pulls out the metal box.

“That's the one from the house?” Dante asks. “That something's in?”

“Something might be in it,” Leo says, holding it in his lap and looking hard at the lock. It's dented, and he isn't sure how to pry past it quite yet.

They've spent most of the day together in their rooms, everyone wanting to be close to Raph, and Raph himself surprised that nobody seems angry at him for being gone so long. He's been more like his old self, after being able to lay out his grief and feel his pain properly.

Right now he's changing Michelangelo's bandages, and snapping at him to hold still and let him help when he squirms. His work is clumsy, but Mikey doesn't complain. Raph seems to have been doing a self-inflicted penance all morning, making tea, clearing breakfast, falling over his brothers trying to help as much as possible. Now he's sitting close to Leo, with Dante lying in his lap on his stomach.

Usagi appears at the door, just as Leo cuts his finger open on the ruined lock.

“Ouch!--oh, good morning, Usagi,” he says, before reaching behind him for a cloth to hold over his hand.

Usagi winces at the wound, and reaches out, eyes on the box in Leo's hands. “Did you take that from your home?”

Leo nods. “It was about all that was left.” He presses down on the offending finger's wound.

“May I see?”

He hands it over. Usagi picks it up, examines it for a moment, then shakes it hard—the mats, and his pants, become grey with ash. Leo's face falls, but Usagi's voice is gentle.

“The fire from the bomb was much too hot to spare valuables, even in here,” he says. “You should save yourselves the trouble.”

Leo's heart sinks. “You're sure we can't just open it?” he asks, still clinging hard to the idea that that box would be their salvation. “Just to make sure?”

Usagi frowns. “I'll pry it open for you, if you like,” he says slowly, “but I've been waiting for Raphael's arrival to give you what was left with us. I'm surprised you were looking in boxes from the ruins when it was all here.”

Donnie looks at Leo, and when he meets his brother's eyes he shrugs, confused. Raph's sitting on his haunches, looking hard at the offending box.

“There's nothing here besides us,” Raph says after a moment's thought. “Nothing survived the fire.”

“You didn't know?” Usagi asks, brows furrowed. “I didn't bring it up before, because you had enough on your minds with the illness and Raphael, but your father left valuables with us a year ago. I thought he'd told you.”

Valuables? Leo's family had lived in a tiny house, with an outhouse in the garden. They had been scraping by even before the war, on sensei's professor salary. Usagi must see his confusion, and his face relaxes into a smile.

“He said it wasn't much, mostly photographs,” he says. “But there's money too, and your documents for the bank. If your family was displaced because of air raids, he wanted to be able to start again. Of course, Leonardo, you're the head of your family now. So it goes to you.”

Leo has completely forgotten his useless metal box. He looks harder at Usagi, and finds that he is hanging his head.

“I wondered why you never asked me about it,” Usagi says. “It might have alleviated some of your worry, to know you had money put away. It's just lucky we live in the part of the city spared the air raids, so it survived.” Leo had ... completely forgotten about the firebombing of Kure. Usagi had actually written right after to tell them their neighbourhood was safe.

It really would have been nice to know, but it's hard to be angry with Usagi for not telling them. Not after everything he's done for them. And he didn't know they hadn't realized. Leo and Raph exchange a glance, before looking back at their brothers.

Leo's a little surprised by what he sees—Mikey looks like he's about to cry and Donnie, confused, reaches out for him. Dante, frowning, rises from Raphael's lap to sit next to Michelangelo instead.

“Why don't you and Raph go with Usagi, Leo?” Donnie says, not even looking at them. “I think the rest of us should look a little later. Dante, come help me with the rest of the bandages.”

A little reluctantly, they follow Usagi out of the room and into Usagi's own, and wait quietly while Usagi rummages through a chest.

“Your father brought this on your last visit,” he says, pulling out a larger, lacquered box. “The documents from the bank are the most important, of course—he told us there wasn't much, but it means not starting completely from scratch.”

Usagi puts it down and clicks open the lock. Leo peers in—right away he sees photos, yellowed envelopes. Yen. His heart soars, and he drops down to the floor to start taking a good look.

“I'll leave you boys to it,” Usagi says, patting Leo's shoulder as he leaves. “You can take it back to your room when you're through.”

He's so excited that he forgets to thank him, and of course Raph does too, too distracted by the contents of the box.

“I don't believe it—Leo, this must be sensei's life savings. I mean, we're still pretty poor...”

“But we can pay back the Miyamotos,” Leo says, carefully counting banknotes. “I mean, not for everything, but it's a start. We might even be able to pay the first rent on a room with this.”

They sort out the funds first, and it's soothing, holding papers sensei touched, carefully placed inside this box. He must have known something was coming, though he had never involved himself in the neighbourhood gossip.

They get to the pictures next, and Leo pauses on sensei's face. This is an old picture of all of them, from right after Dante was born and sensei had lost his second wife. It's hard seeing his face again, and Raph is quick to put it back in the bottom of the box. They'll look harder at it later, when they're all together.

The school pictures of theirs are easier to look at, especially Mikey's first one. He's Dante's age there, and crossing his eyes as he sticks his tongue out. Leo laughs to himself, remembering how Mikey came home and claimed it was worth it, hands swollen red from the switching he'd gotten afterwards.

“Who's this lady?” Raph asks, handing a picture to Leo. He'd been distracted by a picture of their mother, but he takes this one instead. “This isn't Atsuko, is it? She was younger.”

Leo shakes his head, looking hard at the two people. There's a young sensei, looking a lot like Raph will in a few years...and a young woman, about his age now, whom he doesn't recognize. She's dressed Western-style, no Japanese influence in sight. But she's beautiful, smiling warmly out at him with her hand in their father's.

“This must be America, he's so young...I wonder why this picture was important enough to go in here?” Leo asks, mostly to himself. He sets it aside. Maybe he'll ask Usagi about it.

“Old girlfriend?” Raph says, shrugging. “I dunno. Sensei had a life before us.” He digs around in the box some more, and from the bottom he pulls out a yellowing collection of envelopes, tied together. “These have English addresses.”

“Give it here.” Leo takes the envelopes, pulling open the string. Sometimes they exchanged letters with the relations in California—a few second cousins, mostly, and the correspondence was rare, just an obligation. But these are thick envelopes, and they've clearly been preserved carefully.

He sits back on his haunches to get a better look, as Raph dives back into the boxes for stray banknotes. They're all carefully dated...Leo blinks. The first is from 1928, the year sensei and their mother returned to Hiroshima. Leo had been just a baby, born before the move. Mother had been pregnant with Raphael. He ruffles through the rest, confusion growing. They're consistent and frequent, at least every other month and sometimes every few weeks. There are few long gaps. The last is dated October 5th, 1941, two months before America was closed off from contact.

“I'm going to open these,” Leo says. Raph looks up, having found no more banknotes.

“Why?” he asks. “They're probably stuff from the relatives. It's sensei's private correspondence, Leo. Leave it be.”

“This is different,” Leo says, holding out the last letter under Raph's nose. “He never wrote his cousins that often, let alone in secret. He hated writing them! These are thick envelopes.”

“Well,” Raph says, crossing his legs. “Who are they from? Did you even look?” He picks up a photo album, leafing through it. They must be the only people in Hiroshima with this many pictures from before.

Leo didn't look. So now he does, narrowing his eyes a little because it's in neat English letters, a language their proficiency in is poor at best. Only Donnie, having studied before sensei's American books were sold or buried, understands it properly.

He can ...sort of read this, though. An address neatly pencilled in, and a name...it's not Japanese. Chinese? He doesn't know any Chinese. Carefully, he re-opens the envelope, feeling a little like he is unsealing an urn. He sighs a little at the contents. English, of course.

By now, Raph is looking over his shoulder. His English is even worse than Leo's. “Any idea of what it says?”

Leo frowns. “A little. We'll have to show Donnie.” His eyes have caught the words My dear Yoshi at the top, and his confusion about all this is starting to make him anxious. He can only make out scattered words and phrases. Not nearly enough.

They've seen the whole box now, so they carefully put the letters back in order, then put all the bank documents and money in the top of the box. They're going to need it. Leo carries the letters close to his chest.

Leo and Raph are turning a corner when they hear the sobs. They both break into a run, forgetting about the mysterious letters. Raphael almost drops the box in his haste to get inside and see what he can do. Mikey is bawling in Donnie's arms, Dante hovering anxiously to one side. Donnie shoots them a desperate look, and says, “Dante, go wait for Jotaro to come home. We're going to take care of Mikey now.”

“It's not even 10!”

“Get outside!”

Their little brother shoves past Leo, frowning, and they drop onto the mats, stroking Mikey's hair, his face. It takes several minutes to calm him, and then another few for Leo to dare ask what happened. Mikey pillows his head in Raph's lap, wiping his eyes furiously with his sleeve.

“All my friends are dead,” he says. He seems cried out.“I'm not because I was late for work, but they must have been right under the bomb. I saw the bodies, floating down the river. They were all black and red, but some of them—some of them still had their uniforms, so I knew.”

Leo and Raph look at each other, then at Donnie. They don't know what to say, because our friends are dead too is insensitive at best, cruel to all of them at worst. Mikey has not confided in them about his time during the bomb, but they understand that it was too much, for loving, warm Michelangelo to take in unscathed. He's been so good since they got better, sleeping through the night and waking up rested.

“We were talking about sensei,” Donnie says, voice soft and apologetic as if this is his fault. “And we got to talking about the rest of home. It's very hard,” he says, voice cracking just a little.

“And sensei—sensei is dead too!” Mikey bursts out. “I'd rather have no money and no food and no nice house than have him dead! Everyone is dead,” he sobs, turning his face into Raph's lap. “They're all black and roasted up. Even Chikako!” Chikako had been Mikey's cat, a good mouser and mother of many neighbourhood kittens. She must have burned with the house, and Leo has not even thought of her since the morning of the bomb.

Raph strokes his cheek, looking nauseous. They all know the same pain, but Leo, Donnie and Dante were together—Raph was well outside the city limits, full of fear but not forced to run through an inferno. Mikey had been alone. 13 years old and alone, in that.

“I don't want to talk about it,” Mikey says after a long moment. “But I have to. I owe it to my friends. But after I do, I'm never gonna mention it again, okay? You guys can talk all you want about it, but I'm gonna forget it.”

“Talk away,” Leo says, gently. He rests a hand on Mikey's back, hip to hip with Donnie.

Mikey turns back out from Raph's lap, and breathes deeply. He tells them about the flash, its burning heat, how when he woke up his skin hung in sheets from his arm and hands and he had to hold them out in front of him, like a ghost. How the flames were so unbearable that he followed the other ghosts into the water, the wall of fire keeping him from reaching home. How still-living classmates, washed away from their work site downtown, recognized his voice and begged him for relief before they died, sliding under the water. How he ended up on Ninoshima after dragging himself into a military boat, watching everyone else die around him. And how Leo brought him back.

“I said I knew you would when you got there,” Mikey says quietly, “but I didn't really think you'd make it. The fire was so hot.” Then he cries again, but quieter, muffled again in Raph's lap.

Raph is silent, but there are tears on his face. He and Mikey have always been so close, protective of each other. But they hadn't been together.

“Mikey!” Dante sobs, bursting back into the room and launching himself at them. Leo should have guessed he would just wait by the door. Leo holds him to keep him off their brother, and they all stay that way for awhile. It's a relief, to have Mikey's secrets out in the open. His silence on this had disturbed all of them.

Mikey sits up after some time, wiping his eyes. He's not crying any more, but his frown is not usual. Dante jumps out of Leo's lap then to curl up against Mikey, who's rested his head on Raph's shoulder.

“Mikey,” Dante says, like he's been really thinking about it. “We don't have our friends, or sensei...but we all got out, right? And Raph came back.” He leans back, dropping his head into Mikey's lap. His face is serious, very certain. “I bet it means we're always gonna be together. Because it was so bad, but we're all okay.”

He turns to Leo. Dante is still so sure Leo can always make it right. “Right? That's what it means?”

Leo feels exhausted. He wishes he could be as certain as Dante about why they survived, but it ... it is comforting. Sensei is gone, but he knows they would have splintered apart too if only some of them, or God forbid, one, had survived.

“Yeah, Dante. You're right. Thank you for reminding us.” He turns to Michelangelo, swallowing a lump in his throat. “Your friend Hideko, Mikey. I found her in a hospital and she told me you might be on Ninoshima. I would never have thought to look. She might still be alive.”

The effect is instantaneous, and Mikey lights up. “Hideko-san? Kataoka Hideko?” When Leo nods, he jumps right up, and Dante rolls to the floor with a yelp. Raph laughs. It's a little hysterical.

“Aw, this is great! I saw her on my way to school, but I didn't think—Leo, we should go find her! She must be alive, I can feel it!”

They'd kind of suspected Mikey had a crush on this one, but Leo knows that isn't why Mikey is this way. His friends are so precious to him. If he's being honest, there aren't many friends for Leo himself to miss.

“Maybe when your hair grows back,” Donnie says. His eyes are sparkling from tears, but also in that rare way that means he's teasing. “It's still pretty cropped. How will she recognize your ugly mug?”

“She will! I have freckles, too!”

They all laugh, and Donnie gets to his feet to ruffle Mikey's hair. Their dressings all need to be changed too, and he pulls their bandage box toward them to get started. Any more of this soul-searching and the whole house will be underwater from crying.

Leo is getting up, when he realizes the letters he'd found are a little crumpled and falling to the floor.

“Oh, shoot. With all this I forgot to ask about sensei's things.” Donnie is wiping his hands down, so he can unroll his own bandages. He's well enough these days that he can get it himself. “Was there anything we can use?”

He'd almost forgotten they had money again, or even photos, with Mikey's breakdown and the strange English letters. Raph opens his mouth before Leo can. “Some money! And documents, and photographs and stuff. Sensei was all set. And some weird letters sensei had saved up from America.”

Donnie looks at them, surprised, and Mikey turns from the bedroom doorway. Leo shakes his head slightly at Raph. “Later,” he says. “Mikey, don't kick Raph like you did last night when he helped. I know the new bandages hurt.”

More laughter, and he wonders how it still comes so easily to them. How it doesn't taste like blood and ash.

* * *

 

Dante is asleep in Leo's lap when they pull out the letters. They had found time much later to show them to their other brothers, and Donnie's eyes had grown round at the contents of the earliest one, the first he'd chosen to open.

“Should we ask Usagi?” Leo had asked, and Donnie had shaken his head anxiously. No, he had said, later. First he wanted to understand.

This is a good sign—it means Donnie wants to problem-solve again, devour whatever knowledge it was he'd found. This isn't his usual fare, but it's a gold mine of their father's past that he wants to dig as much as them. It's a good distraction, too, because they have re-counted the banknotes after the excitement and found that it's a more disappointing number. Mostly small change, and the statements say there is little left in their account. Leo should have known better, with the war on. They won't be able to pay back the Miyamotos for most of what they owe, at least not for now.

“Well?” Raph says, impatient. “What does it say? You've got that look on your face.”

Donnie looks back at the paper. “I'm just gonna read it, I can't ... I don't believe it.”

That makes four of us. This is the one from when Leo was a baby, and he's curious too, if there will be anything about him, about their mother.

Donnie coughs into his sleeve (it's lingered since his sickness) and finally reads. It's a long letter, and Donnie has to translate it into Japanese to say aloud, so it's slow going. Leo is a little grateful for this, because it lets him process

_“My dear friend Yoshi,_

_It was wise of you to address your letter to the Miyamotos and not to my parents, because I would never have gotten this otherwise! Dear little Usagi brought it to me. They are still so angry at you and I. I just feel grateful that they don't take it out on our child._

“Our child?” Mikey exclaims. “As in, sensei's?”

“Mikey, shh.”

_“She has started to speak so well, your Miwa. I tell her her father is descended from samurai, and she is too.”_

“What the fuck,” Raph says. Nobody scolds him for interrupting. They all stare at Donnie, eyes still wide, as he finds his place on the page again. Still that slow, careful voice, that cannot begin to hold up the weight of the words.

_“How is your little boy? I hope he wasn't too seasick on your journey over. He will probably be walking and talking by the time your next letter arrives. There may be more children in my future as well, Yoshi—my parents have made a match, to end their disgrace. I will move to Pasadena with him, but I'll have Mr. Miyamoto give you my new address before I go. I wish I could write to you openly, but people wouldn't understand. Your wife would understandably angry. I know it was arranged, but I could tell you loved Mitsue the last time we met. I've accepted being your confidante._

_Apparently my new husband is very successful. He owns a department store in my new city. Oh, Yoshi, my parents said he'll “keep me in line.” I am frightened of what that means for Miwa and I. But he's offered to take two disgraces without complaint, so he can't be all bad, in the grand scheme of things. His name is Oroku Saki. I am already sure my letters will have to continue in secrecy._

_Hopefully Miwa will have a father after all, at least...”_

The letter is not even halfway done, but Donnie has trailed off, stunned. They're all reeling, Leo feeling low waves of nausea. Now he knows why sensei never spoke about America.

Raph stands up, wobbling a little on his feet, and Mikey gives him a pained look. Leo aches too, because Raphael had finally made peace with their father. Now the rug has been pulled out from all five of them.

“Who's it from?” Leo manages to ask.

Donnie looks up in surprise, then finds the bottom of the letter. “She signed it Tang Shen. That's a Chinese name, I think?”

“He had another kid,” Raph says. His hands are clenched into fists, something sensei had always hated. “He had another kid with some woman in America, and wrote to her, all this time? And we never knew what a lying, scheming piece of shit--”

“Raph!” Mikey says, desperation in his voice. Raph stares at him, and Leo can tell he's really not all there, as he turns and stomps off, out the door. Dante continues to sleep, oblivious to the unraveling of their father's secret. Leo starts to move Dante to the futons, but Donnie stops him, getting up.

“I'll get him,” he says. He sounds terribly sad. “I mean, I read it all out and ruined his night.” He swallows hard. “I'll fix it.” He goes before they can stop him, still limping on his ankle.

Michelangelo sighs, too shaky and adult for someone his age. “Do you think all those letters are like this? From that lady, about her daughter?”

Leo nods, stroking Dante's hair. “I think they were all from the same person. I'm going to get Usagi to tell us everything tomorrow, okay?” He still cannot wrap his head around the fact that this is what sensei must have done when he locked himself in his room. That this was something that happened even before Leo himself, or even sensei's marriage to their mother.

That he never thought they should know.

“Let's make tea,” Leo says, finally tucking Dante in. “Then I'll change your bandages. It's going to be alright, okay, Mikey?”

“Oh, I know,” Mikey says. His eyes are wide. “It'll be alright. Sensei is still the same sensei. Do you think that lady is still around? Do you think our sister would want to talk to us?”

Leo is almost surprised that Mikey would take to this so quickly. But not really, at the same time. He knows how fast Michelangelo can forgive and make the best of it, or at least be positive. That's how he survived the bomb alone.

Leo is getting up, to start the tea in the kitchen, when Mikey stops him.

“We need to tell them sensei is dead,” Mikey says. His voice only wobbles slightly, and Leo's heart aches for him. “Maybe don't tell Raph yet, but as soon as we can send mail there we have to try, okay? Sensei would want them to know.”

Again, Leo is stunned. Already Mikey wants to write these strangers, so intertwined with them, and Leo is not even certain he's accepted their existence.

“You have a good heart, little brother,” is all Leo says. “Let me get that tea.”

He hopes Raph won't give Donnie too much of a run around out there, on his limp and in that cold night air. Leo is not even certain what, exactly, they should be shocked and angry about (though they all are). Sensei couldn't have had an affair with someone across an ocean—but he continued to contact her, despite his disgrace. And he had prided himself on honesty, had expected the same from his sons. Such a huge secret is unbelievable—but here it is. He starts the stove in the small kitchen. Boils the water.

But...he remembers their mother's frown, her anger, as he measures out the tea leaves. She had argued with sensei, behind closed doors, but the walls were paper and easy to listen through as a little boy. Leo had not understood at the time, but it is coming back to him now: she would mock him, when she was truly angry, about going back to America if he missed them so much. In the wake of his mother's death he had forgotten, a grieving child with much more on his mind.

But they had loved each other too. Sensei had shed tears when Mother died, and only remarried because he thought he couldn't parent alone. And each marriage put a safe wall between him and how he'd failed this Tang Shen.

Leo wipes his eyes with his wrist. He'll forgive sensei too, in time.

* * *

 

He corners Usagi the next day, before work. Raph and Mikey are clearly craning their necks to try and listen, and Donnie pretends he isn't. For once Leo doesn't care if he's going to make him late.

“Leonardo--” Usagi manages, before Leo thrusts the letters out under his nose. He stops, and squints at the name. He freezes, and Leo knows he knows.

“Did you know about this?” Leo asks. He's not angry, not at Usagi. But it disturbs him, that he has known all this time.

“I--” Usagi says. He straightens up. “I haven't seen that name in years ... those were letters in your documents?” Leo nods. Usagi sighs, deeply. “I used to get those to Tang Shen before we moved back to Japan. At the time I didn't understand why they were important. I had no idea they were here, Leonardo. I am sorry.”

“Would your father have known?” Leo is starting to feel bad, that he's interrogating Usagi in this way. He would never lie to them, not really.

Usagi nods. He doesn't seem angry with him. “He did. Your father often confided in mine about his daughter's mother. In time he made sure I understood, too.”

Leo realizes he has clenched his fist, and forces it back open. “Why couldn't my brothers and I have understood?”

He's aware he sounds like a child, whining at the unfairness of it all. But Usagi is being patient with him. His eyes are gentle, and thankfully there's no pity. Leo is grateful for it—he have the heart to stay here if he truly argued with Usagi.

“I believe he would have told you soon,” Usagi says carefully. “But the war began, and there was the chance your brothers would find out. One of you may have let on about your father's American daughter, young as you were. That would have been very bad for all of you.” He rests a hand on Leo's shoulder. “The keipeitai would have come again.”

Leo shudders involuntary—he has a healthy aversion to the secret police, growing up with a father who taught English in this country. “You're right,” he says, after a few minutes. “But it still hurts. Is that why he went back to Japan?”

Usagi nods. “Your mother wanted to come back, but it was mostly about leaving that behind. Not because he wanted to, but the families wouldn't tolerate it.”

Leo lets his shoulders slump. “This was before he got married. Right?” If he's wrong about the timeline, and his father was unfaithful to his mother...

“Yes, yes. And—ah, look at the time. Leo, I have to go, there's a job available and I'd like to let them know about you before work. I promise I'll tell you what I can tonight.” Usagi squeezes his shoulder and is off, kissing Mariko and Jotaro as he goes by.

“Who came back to Japan?” Jotaro asks. “Who got married? Did Leo get married?”

Usagi laughs. “No, of course not. It's all very boring, Jo-chan.”

He leaves, and Leo begins helping Mariko clearing the dishes. He feels very odd. Once again, he is floored by his friend's kindness, his willingness to secure Leo a job, in a comfortable prefectural office. He's no longer unhappy that Usagi knew what they didn't—when would it have been relevant to their lives, distant and distracted by Japan's total war? And Raph had already been so angry since sensei's second marriage. He is already using this as fuel for the fire.

After breakfast, he finds Raph bumming cigarettes off the Americans. He's managed it with only his rudimentary English and hand signals, and the soldiers seem entertained, trying to hand Leo one too as he pulls Raph back to the house.

“What?” Raph says, holding his smoke out of the way as Leo tugs. “I really need one, even from fucking Americans.”

“I talked to Usagi,” Leo says. “He remembers that Tang Shen woman. Knew all about it, but said sensei didn't want us to know while we were at war with America.”

“If I'd known,” Raph growls, taking a long drag, “I would have run away ages ago. He never thought we should know he was unfaithful to our mother? That he's a lying bastard?”

“He wasn't unfaithful,” Leo sighs, stopping them by the gate. Mariko won't have cigarettes on her property. “He had a baby with that woman before he met Mother. I guess our grandparents arranged a marriage to get him away from that.”

“Well, then he was a shithead to that woman too,” Raph says. “To leave her hanging like that because mommy and daddy were mad at him. He never really loved Mother.”

“For God's sake, Raphael!” Leo says, losing his patience. Raph is more of a child than Dante and Mikey combined. “Sensei loved Mother, whatever that even means. He cried when she died. And it wasn't like he could cheat on her across an ocean. They'd clearly put it behind them.”

Raph drops his cigarette, grinding it into the asphalt with the heel of his boot. “I'd just forgiven him,” he says. His voice is calmer, if shaky. “It's going to take me ages. There's some girl in America, who's related to us. I bet she knows all about us.”

Leo doesn't mention yet that he's going to write to her. Not now—it'll only make Raph angrier. “Well, I hope you're not mad at her. It's not her fault we share her father.”

Raph sighs. “Yeah,” he says. “That's true. I'm ... gonna need awhile. To stew on this.”

“Do you want to go pray to sensei?” Leo asks. “Mother and Atsuko, too. Maybe the focus will clear your head.”

Raph stiffens his shoulders. He's still not over sensei's death, and this has only made it more painful. And Leo knows he's never prayed for Atsuko. Not because he hated her, but simply because it bothered sensei. “Why did he even get married a second time? Why didn't he just tell that woman to come on over?”

“Yeah, you know how much our country loves foreigners,” Leo says dryly. “Her name's Chinese, and she's from evil, decadent America, remember? I think that chapter was closed for them already, Raphael.”

“Still,” Raph says, scowling again briefly. “Even if she couldn't come, we never needed a mother. We would have done okay.”

Leo thinks about waking up early to get his brothers dressed, making breakfast when sensei had to go in early and dinner when he'd worked late. He'd been seven when the neighbour ladies had stopped helping them. He'd actually been relieved when sensei said he was getting married again. It wouldn't be like having a mother, but it had made life easier for a couple of years.

Then she had died giving birth, and Leo had returned to his old duties twofold, with his baby brother to help tend to. They'd been constantly taking chore shifts and time off school to keep everyone fed and afloat. He even remembers being strapped for falling asleep in class.

Leo doesn't say any of this. “That's easy to say now,” he says. “And we wouldn't have Dante without Atsuko.”

Raph snorts, but it doesn't mean anything. Despite his anger about sensei's marriage, Leo's never seen him take it out on Dante. “Little brat. We should send him back to school soon. Mikey, too.”

“We can't afford it yet,” Leo says, shoulders slumping. He can see how Dante wants to follow Jotaro every morning. “And we can't make another debt with the Miyamotos.”

“One day we'll pay it all back,” Raph says, and his voice is so sure Leo almost believes him. “Don't worry about that, Leo. We'll find work soon.”

“Sensei wanted you to finish school,” Leo says, forcing a smile. To his surprise, Raph smiles back. He's calming down, eyes sad.

“He did, but I don't think he would have been all that shocked if I hadn't. I've always kind of been the bad son when it came to that stuff.”

Leo punches his shoulder. “Shut up. He'd be proud of you for stepping up.”

Raph looks out at the harbour. You can almost see the smudge of Ninoshima from this house, where Leo pulled Mikey from that overflowing hospital. To the east, the fires of Hiroshima are no longer burning. Have not for some time.

“The day of the bomb,” he says slowly, like it hurts. “We were coming back from the air raid warning, and then we heard this roar...I knew Hiroshima must be under attack. And I looked up, and there was—Leo, you wouldn't believe it, this cloud shot up like a column.”

He pauses, breathing a bit shakily. Leo squeezes his shoulder. “I saw that cloud, and I've never felt so horrible. I knew you must all be under it. I should never have run away. Maybe if I hadn't, sensei--”

Leo stops him there, holding a finger to his lips. “I'm glad you ran away,” he says. “I never thought you'd be safer in the army than at home with us.”

Wherever sensei is, he is relieved too. Leo knows this. They need to be together.

Raph wipes his eyes with one fist, sniffing hard. “I thought you'd be those burned people who left the city and found us. I was sure you were dying like that when I saw them.”

“Well, we weren't,” Leo says, tugging Raph's sleeve a little so they can head back inside. Raph follows without complaint. “I don't know why we survived, but we made it back to you.”

They're quiet for awhile after that, watching the distant boats sail in and out of Kure Harbour. There are massive troop ships arriving now, full of the Americans who will occupy their soil.

“I'm still mad about that woman,” Raph says, as they're latching Usagi's gate shut again. “I mean—he was so stupid to get her in trouble. But I can't do anything about it.”

Leo breathes deeply, and decides to risk it. “Mikey and I want to write that address. So we can tell her what happened.”

Raph looks up sharply. “What?”

He winces, and holds up his hands in defense. “Only to tell her about sensei! He has a daughter over there, Raph. She deserves to know what happened to her father.”

Raph stares for another long moment, wide eyed, and Leo prepares for him to unravel again. Instead, Leo sees him restrain himself, unclenching his fists.

“Yeah. Guess so. You guys can take care of it,” he says, and picks up his pace into the house.

Leo stands there for awhile. Sighs. “Good talk, Raph.”

* * *

 

_To Tang Shen and her daughter, Miwa,_

_If the address I have written to is not right, I hope this letter reaches you safely. I am Hamato Yoshi's oldest son. He had last written you right before the war, when my brothers and I didn't know about you._

_My brothers and I are writing to tell you our father has died. He has been dead since August 6th, when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and destroyed the city. All of my brothers survived, and our father's important documents had been safe with a friend. This is how we discovered your letters. Please forgive us for reading your private correspondence, but we were very surprised to learn about you._

_We are currently living in Kure with the same friends who kept your letters. They didn't know these were with our documents, but I have talked to Miyamoto Usagi and he remembers you from his childhood. His father passed away last year of natural causes. You will probably remember him. He was close with our own father._

_I hope this letter is not intruding. We thought you should know that our father's fate, after all those years without contact. I wish I did not have to tell you that news._

_My younger brother Donatello has written this for me, as my English is not very good. I am practicing. My brothers and I are recovering from our injuries and are all well._

_Regards,_

_Leonardo Hamato_

* * *

 

Leo, Mikey and Donnie pore over this letter for a long time, trying to keep it short and in proper English. Thank goodness for Donnie, because Leo would never have sent a readable note without him.

“Do you think she'll write back?” Mikey asks, after he seals the envelope. “I know we asked, but do you think she actually will?”

Donnie shrugs. “Well, we have to hope she even gets the letter first—she might have moved away. I mean, I don't see why not. But don't get your hopes up.”

They've read through a bit more of the letters since that night, and Donnie plans to go through the rest as soon as he can. He's not feeling well again, so there's not much he can do besides sit and read. It worries Leo, that Donnie still hasn't gotten his colour back.

“She seemed to like hearing about us, at least in the beginning,” Leo says. “And it's not like they stopped writing on bad terms...I think. Since the war started between us and them right after their last letter.”

“I'll check the final one before we send this,” Donatello says, rubbing his temples. “I don't think that's what happened either, but if there's any more drama here we'd better know it.”

It's a shame, that this is the only place Donnie can use his talents now. University, in Kyoto or Tokyo, had seemed a real possibility before the mobilizations and the bomb. Leo is not sure Donnie could physically handle the stress now, let alone the cost.

Mikey smiles his golden smile at them. “Well, we won't get a letter back for ages. I bet they won't even send it over for ages, since they still hate Japan.”

Michelangelo is awfully cheerful about that. It makes Leo feel strange. America is the country of his birth, though he's never had a reason to connect until now.

“We won't worry too hard about it,” Donnie says. “There's enough to worry about. I need a job to help with the debt.”

He does, and Leo hates to admit it. He reaches out to squeeze his brother's arm.

“Get better first,” he says. Then he realizes the time, that Mikey's bandages need changing and the wound airing out. They've been diligent, but the burns still ooze painfully on him. “Only I should have to worry about this stuff.”

Donnie looks at him, eyes much older than his 15 years. He's too smart not to worry like he and Raph do. He knows their situation in ways Dante and even Mikey don't, and it's a relief.

“Well, don't worry about me, then,” he says, smiling instead. “And I'll take my share of whatever else you've got.”

The quiet days at home end when Leo gets on the train to the bank of Hiroshima, a building that survived the bomb as a concrete shell. He goes with Raph, firstly because they're now inseparable, and secondly because Leo doesn't want to go back alone.

It's a little better than when they left it, and Raph says most of the bodies had been cleared by the time he got through, too. There are roads cleared. Even streetcars are working, from which they can watch the devastation go by. He sees the school he had been walking Dante to, windows blown out and floors collapsed in. He wonders how many little kids had been on those floors.

They try to ignore the shacks, which less fortunate people than them are now living in. They are so lucky, to be beloved guests in Usagi's beautiful home. Not tainted castoffs.

The visit to the bank is actually the easiest thing, the teller skimming through their savings like it's not apocalyptic outside. He's got a bluish, crescent scar on his face, stained from the black rain of that day. He doesn't sneer at their poverty.

“Wish I'd hidden mine too,” he says as he's handing Leo back cash, eyes wistful. “Good for your father.”

They both feel ashamed, like they should be dressed in rags and not the good clothes Mariko gave them the night before. They ask around for jobs, any jobs, before they go home, but only the fast-forming gangs are hiring here. The poor are ripe for the picking, with no economy or police to stop them. Leonardo's family has enough problems without the yakuza involved.

Leo takes Raph to the school he found Mikey's friend at, but nobody can tell them where she went. Too many young girls with festering, burned faces here in Hiroshima. They stop at the end of their street in the evening, not for long, but enough time to say goodbye. Raph and the rest of Leo's brothers had been born in that house.

They're about to leave when they see an old man, burns on his arms and legs totally bandaged, sweeping outside of his tiny shack. Leo stops and stares for a moment, before stumbling forward.

“Murakami-san?”

It's like something out of his dreams, ridiculously distant in his memories. Their neighbour had owned a noodle shop, whose only business near war's end had come from drunk officers and condemned soldiers. Food had been scarce. But as children Leo and his brothers had gone next door to eat leftovers.

The man looks up, and his face lights up. “Boys! I hope you're not here for noodles.”

They actually laugh, and talk briefly, Leo trying not to look at the scrap metal shack compared to their own comfortable house. Mr. Murakami pulled himself out of his home that day, but could not free his wife. He had thought none of his neighbours had freed themselves. His son died months ago in Okinawa, so he's alone. He seems pleased to hear that all of Leo and Raph's brothers survived. It's a conversation Leo is glad to end, though it's good to see him again.

“I will pray for your father,” he says when they're leaving. “Please say a prayer for my wife and my son, too.”

It's hard to walk away, knowing what they're leaving him to.

“We're never going back,” Raph says, the first thing either of them has said since they started their walk back to the station. “I can't stand it. I'm glad there were no jobs in the city.”

“But we need them now,” Leo reminds him. He's pretty sure that tomorrow he'll go with Usagi, and secure the position he found for him at work, but he can't take any chances. And there's no room for Raph or Donnie at that office.

He wonders if it's true that nothing will grow in Hiroshima again, if it will be uninhabitable. He and Raph stop by a cremation. The both fold their hands in prayer here, for the unidentified dead, for their dead. For Mr. Murakami's family.

They finally get back to the train station. On the way home, Raph falls asleep on Leo's shoulder, and Leo can get a good look at his face, the worry lines smoothed out. He looks almost like a little child again.

What did he see on his own? Leo wonders. He's a survivor, too. He just wasn't under that mushroom cloud.

* * *

 

At the end of October, things fall apart.

Leo isn't there to see it, in his second week in the municipal office. He doesn't go home for lunch with Usagi, wanting to make the best impression possible and working through the hour to sort extra documents. He's thinking about how lucky he is to have gotten this job, and how much easier it is on his back than the munitions factory had been.

Usagi comes back earlier than usual, and his face is white. Leo pauses in his filing, looking surprised.

“I've already gotten you permission to go home for the day,” Usagi says, and Leo's chest seizes. He almost drops the work he's holding too, but he puts the last of it away and stumbles out the door with Usagi, saying nothing but his mind already reeling. Leo doesn't realize until they're inside the gate that his nails have dug into the palms of his hands.

He expects Dante to meet him at the door like always, to tell him about whatever terrible thing has happened or whoever has relapsed, but it's Donnie who's there, reaching out to give his hand a brief squeeze.

“Raph went for the doctor already, he should be back soon,” he says, already tugging Leo towards their room. Leo barely hears him, wondering which little brother has lapsed, who he has failed after everything was starting to come together. He yanks the door open, where Mikey sits next to Dante's bedroll.

There is blood.

Leo gives a small, horrified cry as he leaps forward, reaching out for one of Dante's small hands, as Mikey holds a cloth to their brother's bleeding nose. Dante squeezes Leo's fingers, propped up on three pillows and looking as frightened as Leo feels. He smooths out his expression, the gentle big brother again, but it's too late. Dante has seen the panic around him, and knows he is in danger.

“He kept asking for you,” Mikey says, and there's a twinge in his voice that Leo should recognize, but can't dwell on in the face of this new tragedy.

“I'm freezing,” Dante says, muffled by the bloody cloth.

With his good hand, Leo strokes Dante's hair, his warm cheeks. “You must have come down with a bad flu,” he says, trying not to let his voice wobble. “But it's okay. We're here. I'm going to take care of you.”

The doctor arrives, and with the help of a sniffling Jotaro, retrieved from a corner of the garden, the whole story is retold. Dante had not been feeling well since breakfast, but he had been able to follow Jotaro outside and drop stones in the koi pond, and ride on the back of Jotaro's old bicycle. As they had gone inside for lunch, Dante had fallen and been unable to get back up. His nose began bleeding, and too dizzy to sit up fully, Raph had carried him to bed. Leo is numb as he listens, and it reminds him of those days in Hiroshima, the only way to cope with what he saw.

The doctor is much kinder than Leo has ever seen him, but he shakes his head as he checks Dante, hands hovering over the purple spots on his arms (how long have those been there?). He speaks to Raphael and Usagi outside the door instead of Leo, and he only realizes that it's happened without him when they come back in together. Mariko appears too, replacing the bloody cloth on Dante's face with a fresh one, silently disposing of the first.

Leo doesn't have to hear it—he knows what this is, that radiation has weakened his brother's body just as it weakened his own weeks before. But now he can see a painful, atomic death careening towards them, one he thought he had prevented when they got free of the fires and the sickness.

He looks at Dante's pale, shivering form and knows how much worse it is. His brothers are silent, making food that Leo doesn't eat and taking turns sitting on Dante's other side, waiting for the nosebleed to finally trickle out.

Dante sleeps, and Leo realizes that his brothers are treating both of them gently, Leo and Dante together. They've seen Leo raise him and care for him, when he needed it so badly as an infant. Now he'll probably die, another part of Leo's shredded soul with him. The warmest, most polished piece that survived the bomb unscathed.

Mikey and Donnie don't say goodnight to him later, only to their baby brother before disappearing into the next room. Donnie will change the bandages tonight. Raph stays longer, squeezing Leo's shoulders and then bending down, pressing his lips and nose to Dante's soft hair before he goes.

He's grateful to all of them, and prays that the smallest piece is not the keystone in their frail family.

* * *

 

Leo doesn't sleep, and he's fully aware of every second that passes that night, next to Dante's restless, feverish body. The next morning, early, he finds that his brother's hair is coming out in dark clumps. Dante can't sit up on the toilet himself and shivers, even back under the covers, with warm rice broth coaxed into him.

Mariko brings the doctor again, though he gives them the same prognosis—make him comfortable, and wait. Leo doesn't go to work that day. Or the next, and on the third day of Dante lying still on the floor Donnie follows Usagi to the prefectural office instead. They can't afford to lose this job, but Leo can't bring himself to leave these rooms. If Dante dies, he has to be here to comfort him as he crosses over.

Raph is only in their room long enough to eat, spending days weeding Mariko's garden or lifting for her, looking for work in the neighbourhood. Anything but this death watch. Whatever fees are in their future, medical or funeral or otherwise, should be covered themselves from now on, though the Miyamotos bring the doctor around before anyone even has to ask. Leo thinks about these things, but Donnie and Raph look after them and he says nothing to either of them about it. He knows he should, but Dante needs him. And he's just so tired.

Mikey is always there too, but silent, unless he's speaking gently to Dante or asking their brothers something mundane. He makes rice broth to coax into him and meals for the rest of them, though Leo barely eats any.

One night Dante sweats so much that they have to change his sheets twice, all the while Leo making him swallow water. When he opens his eyes, they're unseeing, and he cries for Leo as he lies in his lap.

He's only leaving to use the bathroom when he almost trips over a figure huddled by the doorway, and actually stops to look, really look. It's Jotaro, still in his school clothes and his little fist wiping away tears. He looks up at Leo, wide-eyed.

“I'm gonna miss him too, you know!” he bursts out before Leo can speak, bolting down the hallway again and back outside. They don't see him for the rest of the day.

Leo refuses to think about the moment Dante will leave him.

“I hate the bomb,” Mikey says one day. He's lying on his good side next to Dante's bedroll, his burns still too painful to put pressure on. But they are healing. He'll recover.

“Don't we all,” Leo says softly, tipping Dante's head up for another drink of water. It's these things that bring Dante some alertness, keep him with Leo for another day. His whole being is focused on this brother and his scraps of life.

Mikey looks at him, and his eyes are hard enough to surprise Leo. He's been so quiet lately, and Leo has gotten accustomed to the silence of their rooms when Raph and Donnie are out.

“I'm gonna lose two brothers to the bomb,” he says. “Dante will probably die and you'll die with him. And then what are we gonna do? You're going to leave us, Leo.”

His words are cold and clinical—words Leo never thought he would use to describe Michelangelo, a ray of sunlight filling every house he enters.

“Mikey, listen--”

“No, you listen.” He sits up on his elbow, still staring hard at Leo. “You carried our brothers out of the fire! And then you went and got me. And you didn't stop, not once, and I thought it was because you loved us.” Leo realizes, too late, that his brother's cheeks are wet. “But you just love Dante. You—if he died, you'd probably have just left us there! If he dies I need you, Leo, I love him too!”

Mikey stands up and stomps out, and Leo can hear screens slamming shut.

“I won't die,” Dante croaks out. Leo turns abruptly—how is he awake?

Leo isn't feeling much of anything, but he can still imagine himself being strung out, stretched further and further as the tension builds until he finally he snaps, on Mikey's too-dark words.

He leans down. Kisses Dante's forehead.

“You're right. I'm sorry, baby brother.” He makes a motion to smooth back Dante's hair, but he's bald since his sickness began. “You're very tough. Keep showing us how tough you are.”

He falls back into sleep. Leo keeps his vigil, quiet and still.

A few hours later, when the shadows cast through the screens are longer, Mikey returns to their room in tears, pressing one hand to Dante's forehead as he rests his face in the crook of Leo's shoulder. Leo is—not surprised, exactly, by the change of heart, but pleased that it comes so quickly after Mikey's dark words.

“I didn't mean it!” he cries, and Leo nods, stroking the fuzz of Mikey's hair growing back. He feels dazed. “I just—it's really scary, with Dante sick. Like you wouldn't be so scared if it were us.”

“I--” Leo says. He isn't sure how to respond, with his brain still soft and muddled and Mikey's tears wetting his shirt.

“It's okay, though,” Mikey says, sniffing. “I thought about it, and I know you don't mean to do that. Dante didn't have a mom so he needed you. And he still needs you the most.”

It occurs to Leo that Mikey barely had a mother either, that she vanished after 3 years to Leo's 7 with her. But Leonardo never really took special care of him. Mikey was always so happy and healthy that he rarely worried too hard.

He squeezes Mikey's shoulder, and they sit together, listening to Dante's wheezing breaths. Once Dante starts to cough blood and Mikey reaches for the bowl, though he doesn't have to. Really, he should still be resting, with how slow his burn is healing.

Leo puts Mikey back to bed, tucking the sheets around like Mother used to. To his relief, his brother is asleep in minutes and he dares to stay there for a time, a whole wall away from Dante's pallet.

“I'm sorry,” he says, when Michelangelo's breathing has evened and he can't hear Leo's shame.

The next night, all of them are awake. Dante has hovered on the edge of life and death since the night Mikey apologized, not responding to anyone or anything. Mariko has brought them rice, but they've had to force it down so as not to waste it. It's hard to be hungry when your brother is dying.

They talk to him quietly and stroke his head, and Leo thinks that at least sensei and sensei's wives are on the other side, ready to welcome his little brother.

“Don't worry, little brother,” Mikey says. He hasn't cried, not that Leo can see. His own cheeks are wet—so are Donnie's, though his face is expressionless. “It's going to be okay. You'll get to sleep as late as you want and be with sensei. No more hurt.”

Donatello covers his eyes. Leo can't see Raph, but knows he's turned towards the wall, Dante in barely a sliver of his vision. Nobody talks besides Mikey (who has words only for Dante) and they wait.

And wait. Their brother continues to breathe.

At some point Leo emerges out of a doze, sitting up sharply—and realizes Dante's breaths have continued. It might have been hours since Mikey last spoke. But they're not ragged and laboured as before. Sitting up straighter, he shoves Donnie awake with one hand and peers closer. “Dante?”

He's asleep, of course. He won't answer. But that's all he is, sleeping quietly, dried blood at the corners of his lips. Hand shaking just slightly, Donnie touches his forehead, and when he pulls back and looks at Leo he's flushed in surprise.

“Fever's gone,” Donnie says, in disbelief. “And look how peacefully he's sleeping ... I can't be sure yet, but he looks a lot more okay.”

“No fucking way,” Raph says, sitting up, and Mikey gasps, holding his hands to heart with dramatic flair. He's grinning, for the first time in weeks.

“Raa-aph! Language!”

Leo laughs shakily, reaching out to touch Dante's cheek. It's warm, alive. He had almost been ready to let him go and let the numbness course through his body. The thought of not having his brother had almost been real. But he's still here.

“Better get the doctor,” he says, squeezing Dante's hand in his. “He might not believe you, though, so we'll have to pay up front.”

“Worth it!” Mikey says. He's bouncing off the floor already, rushing out to go start breakfast for the house. It seems safe to leave.

“Wake up Usagi so we can get the doctor!” Leo calls after him. His voice is hoarse, and he doesn't feel bad about disturbing the family. He's not sure he can stand up himself to do this.

Raph looks at Leo then, and they both smile, exhausted. For them, it's time to sleep too.

* * *

 

_1946_

* * *

 

The occupation of his country is in full swing now, but Leo cannot bring himself to feel bothered by it. If anything, it's a relief, because it means there will be no violent invasion, and maybe things will improve. These men are still foreign, though, and he walks by them with his chin tipped up. He survived their onslaught. Their presence means it's over.

Donatello finds his usefulness with their appearance. When the local officer finds out he speaks perfect English, they hire him on as a translator. They have nisei from the States working too, American-born Japanese, but they don't know the area or the customs.

One day early on in this job, Donnie gets one of the soldiers to mail off their letter. They do it, and hear nothing about it for months. Leo figures the mail is slow. Or hopes it's just slow. But they continue to look through her letters, this woman's view of their life history. And trudge through her life, which has not been easy. Oroku Saki was not a kind husband to her.

“Here comes the collaborator,” Raph will say when Donnie comes through the door. The first time he'd said this Leo had gotten angry, but it's almost become a joke. Even Usagi has been finding it harder to get food, his storage running out and the black market harder to navigate. Donnie's income, and what food he brings from the Americans, helps quite a bit.

With their salaries, they can afford to send the younger two back to school. But Leo decides to wait—Mikey still winces when he takes a bath and his scars hit the water. They're thick and often cumbersome; Usagi calls them keloids and says they should fade in time. Dante is raring to join Jotaro in class, bored during the day, but he's still too weak. They put the money for fees away instead, and promise he can start next year.

Dante's recovery has been slow, and the first weeks after that broken fever were still frightening. But he gets stronger every day, and is allowed to play with Jotaro in the garden if he's been resting. Leo still dreams of his coughing blood, it soaking every cloth he replaces. The doctor says the worst is over.

“Aren't you frightened?” asks one of Leo's coworkers one day. “It's more frightening to be occupied to be bombed, I think. Imagine what they could do to us!”

She is from the country, where they were less hungry and never atom bombed. Leo tries hard not to shake her. To him, things can only get better, his brothers still alive and together. Most people don't agree—but he truly feels he's right.

And nobody at work knows he was there, or injured, because people believe they can catch the radiation sickness. Leo doubts it, because wouldn't the Miyamotos have been the first? He and his brothers talk about the pika-don, the flash-boom of the bomb, together, but their secret is relatively safe.

Well—four of them talk about it. Mikey always leaves the room when it starts.

Raph, who vowed never to return to Hiroshima, begins taking the train every day to its suburbs for reconstruction efforts. He is paid in food, another welcome rice ration.

The worst thing by far are Dante and Donnie's sudden onset of screaming, thrashing nightmares. Something about Dante's illness has set the dreams off in the family, Leo included. It jars all of them, but those two will take minutes at a time to wake up, crying for sensei or their mothers, or about the fires. Dante is easy to comfort once he's awake and in someone's arms, but Donnie is often panicked, still wide-eyed.

“I vomit and vomit until there's no more blood,” he sobs into Leo's side, hands gripping his sleeve. “I want to die. I want to be with sensei.”

Leo lies awake whenever this happens, going over his own memories and wondering if his brothers will ever recover. In the mornings, Dante is always cheerful again and Donnie is his gentle self, getting ready for work and smiling at his waking brothers. It's as if they all got full night's sleep.

One day on the way home, Usagi asks Leo if they can talk. Leo braces himself, and it must be visible, because Usagi smiles at him. Maybe it's time to go, that they're wearing out their welcome here.

“I'd like to ask you to stay with us longer, at least into the next year,” Usagi says. Leo blinks and stares at him, surprised. They had almost had enough for a down payment on a two-room place.

“It's a favour to me,” Usagi continues, pretending to be unaware of Leo's staring. He's smiling. “Mariko is expecting another baby, and caring for such a large household is getting exhausting for her. But you've really started pulling your weight.”

Leo is very quiet as they walk a few more blocks. The weather is getting pleasantly warm again. Usagi, apparently eternally patient, waits. “I don't understand,” he says finally. “You don't want us to leave even sooner? My brothers and I are five extra mouths to feed, with a baby coming, and I haven't paid you back even half--”

“You're supporting your brothers more and more,” Usagi says. “Three of you are working, and the little ones will be in school when they're well. And it's not as if we would turn you out. But if you'd like to leave regardless, I understand.”

“Plenty of people would turn out a hibakusha,” Leo says, voice low. “One hibakusha, let alone five.” He knows the word now, for what they are. Explosion-affected people.

And Usagi understands the horror too, entering Hiroshima just several days after the bomb. Mariko lost her brother. Often Leo forgets this, selfish in his own pain.

Usagi's eyes darken. “I am not those people,” he says firmly. “You do not have to leave, Leonardo. Things will get harder with the food shortage, but I'd like to have you around as Mariko gets more tired. Our fathers would want us to look out for family, wouldn't they?”

He squeezes Leo's shoulder, then strides ahead to open the gate. Leo's stomach aches. He does not deserve Usagi, or this kindness.

“One thing, though,” Usagi says, holding open the gate. Leo stops again, because Usagi's voice is very sad. “If someone falls ill again, you must pay the doctor yourself. I can house you, but I can't afford it, with the baby coming. But let us pray the danger has passed. I wish I could provide that for you boys.”

Leo tries not to be afraid. Dante gets better every day, and Mikey's burns do heal, albeit slowly. He's very lucky, he tells himself, following Usagi inside. His little brothers eat, for now, and have a roof to live under. Usagi is excellent at saving face for Leo. Mariko is very kind to them, and they are generally careful to behave themselves. But these are hard times for the Miyamotos, too. It has taken its toll.

He'll tell the others tonight, but first he'll tell a story to Dante, he thinks. A funny one, that sensei once told them about his restaurant job in Pasadena. The one about the fish falling on the old white lady passing by...

Leo's met at the door by Michelangelo, after Usagi has gone to get changed. At first Leo's chest seizes, sure someone is sick again, that Donnie or Dante has relapsed or even Raph is ill...

His little brother is grinning widely, eyes brighter than he's seen them in a long time. He thrusts something into Leo's hands. A letter, in a thick, heavy envelope. It can't just be one note.

“She wrote back!” He's almost jumping up and down. “Leo, look! We've been waiting for you to open it, we're just waiting for Raph now! I can't believe it!”

Leo relaxes, and even forces a smile. He had expected the letter to take much longer, if it was coming at all. He lets Mikey take him by the hand and lead him to their rooms. Mariko smiles at him as they pass, and he notices she has gotten rounder at the middle. He smiles back, genuine; he should have guessed, remembering well when Atsuko was pregnant with Dante.

Mikey rushes off to make tea when Leo is settled, apparently determined to make this an event. Donnie smiles at him—Leo can see he's excited, too. He's gotten much better at translating around.

“Leo!” Dante says, reaching right away for Leo's lap. “Leo, the American lady wrote!”

“So she did,” Leo says, pulling his brother's warm, living weight against him. Sometimes it's still hard to believe he's going to be okay. “But we're waiting for Raph to get home from work. Did you behave for Mariko?”

Dante makes a face. “Yeah, of course. I can't do anything but stay in bed!”

“Mariko is tired,” he says, and exchanges a look with Donnie. He wonders if he has noticed why she's needed extra help. “So try not to ask too much of her during the day?”

Leo isn't sure Dante fully understands who 'the American lady' is, or why she is writing. Just that they have a sister belonging to that lady. And that it happened too long ago to really concern him. Usually they read through Tang Shen's letters after he has gone to bed, though for some of the later ones they've saved parts that mention him.

“I wish we had sensei's letters, too,” Dante said. He's leaning against Leo's chest, snuggled up. “I wonder what he wrote about us? Do you think he wrote about when I was born?”

“I'm sure he did,” Leo says. And it would have been a sad letter, speaking about the funeral of his second wife. Wondering how he'd care for five children, one a helpless infant, alone. “Do you remember the one we read you, where she talked about getting married to your mother?”

Dante nods. “She said she liked the picture of Mama and sensei in their wedding things. I wish I could see it.” He frowns into his lap. Lately Dante has asked after his mother, especially after his nightmares. Before the bomb he had never even thought about having two parents.

They had not read the part of the letter where Tang Shen comforted Yoshi, about Atsuko's tears on her wedding day. That she would grow to love his family. Atsuko had been the youngest of several daughters, and had not wanted to marry a poor old man with four children.

“Sensei and your mother were very kind to each other,” Donnie says from the other side of the room.

“And we're glad she gave us you,” Leo says, ruffling his hair. “She left all her good parts with you on Earth.”

Dante furrows his brow. “She left that, but sensei just left bones?” he asks, looking up at Leo. “That's not very fair for sensei.”

Raph arrives with Mikey just then, with tea in tow, and Leo and Donnie thankfully don't have time to stew on this. Especially Donnie, who suddenly looks close to tears.

“Alright, letter time!” Leo says, a little too loudly. He can tell Raph has noticed something just happened, but suddenly Donnie is pushing the envelope into his hands.

The first thing he finds inside is a wad of letters, as thick as the one he had found in sensei's box. He can't stop his hand shaking when he sees sensei's neat handwriting, and he sets the pages aside carefully.

“She sent us sensei's letters to her,” he says, soft. His brothers all crane their necks to look—having his words, even to others, is almost like having sensei's voice again.

The next thing is a photo, of a young woman whose face makes him start. She looks like them, and like their father. She's smiling in the picture, but it's in stark contrast to the barbed wire fence behind her. Her eyes are sharp like sensei's. He passes the photo around. When it gets to Donnie he reads, “Karai, 1944. Tula Lake, California.”

Do they live there now? Do Americans chain their people up with barbed wire?

“This is her daughter,” Donnie says, though everybody knows.

“Our sister,” Mikey corrects, rotating the photo between his fingertips. It ends up in Dante's lap when Donnie picks out Tang Shen's letter itself, Raph barely glancing at the image.

Donnie's gotten much better at translating aloud after all these months, and it's usually as if he's reading pure Japanese off the paper. Today, though, he's stopped, brow furrowed as he goes through.

“Everything okay?” Leo asks after a moment.

Donnie nods, and swallows hard, before starting.

_“Dearest Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello, Michelangelo and Dante,_

_I cannot tell you how relieved I was to get your letter. I am so sorry and saddened to hear of your father's passing, and I wish his hand had written me instead of yours. Not because I am not pleased to have this page, but because you have lost your father and must do what he should have. This war has caused you so much senseless pain. I am sorry for that too._

_I am glad that all five of you have survived and are safe. Your father loved you so much, and for you to not be together would be wrong. It was brave of you to send that letter, when I am such an intrusion on your family and so far away. But I know you're all good boys. Yoshi spoke so highly of you._

_Karai has written you a longer letter than mine. She is very excited to speak with you—the news you're alive has really cheered her up after her experience in the war. She only just returned from the country as well. If you don't want to stay in contact with us after this letter, we understand, but please write back so I know you got the package. But I would like very much to stay in touch._

_Enclosed are your father's letters to me. They will tell you more about us. There are a few other things Karai and I hope you can use._

_Thank you for telling me about Yoshi. Keep being brave._

_Tang Shen”_

Donnie wipes his eyes—not from Tang Shen's suffering, Leo knows. It's sad, but it's no longer having sensei's love and guidance that's making his stomach churn.

“Well, that's that,” Raph says, too loudly. Donnie is going through the rest of the envelope to see if there's anything else. “She sent us sensei's stuff, nice. Now we don't have to think about her.”

“Raph,” Donnie says.

“Don't 'Raph' me,” he snaps. “You don't look like sensei to me.” He's shaking a little. Maybe this is too much, still, they should have waited a little longer. “We told her he's dead, she knows, we're done. Hope sensei's daughter has a nice life.”

“Raph, shut up,” Donnie says. He's holding...a wad of bills. American bills, something quite familiar now in their occupied state. He's staring at them.

“Oh my god,” Leo says, reaching out to take them. Mikey is leaning on his shoulder to get a better look, pressed against his side. It's not a lot in America, probably. But here it will stretch, especially on the black market.

Raph's eyes are wide too, but obviously in anger. “We don't need her charity.” He spits the words. “Send it back.” They see that his eyes are bright with tears, and red-faced, he stomps off.

Leo sighs heavily, and falls back onto their bedrolls, exhausted. “Maybe we shouldn't keep it.” How have things become so complicated? Why is he the one who needs to deal with it?

“Are you crazy?” Donnie says. “Look at this country. We still need all the help we can get, and if she sends money...I don't know, Leo. She does seem kind.”

Mikey taps him on the shoulder. “I think she's nice,” he says. “Look, she wrote the letter to all five of us. You didn't mention all our names, so she must remember us from Sensei's letters. She didn't have to do those things.”

For once, Leo is unmoved. He stands up, and Dante and Mikey are left to scramble away quickly. Leo has a second letter in his hand, one he knows is from their sister.

“You guys start dinner without me,” Leo says. “I'm going to go read this letter.”

“Without us?” Donnie asks as he's leaving. His eyebrows are raised. “Or, let me rephrase that. Without me, and my English?”

“Yes,” says Leo. He gets up, and takes himself and the letter elsewhere in the house.

Leo's not going to bother finding Raphael. He'll go for an angry smoke or five, maybe get into a scuffle with some neighbourhood boys, if they so happen to taunt him for his hibakusha brothers. Leo goes to the sitting room and finds Usagi instead.

“Can you read this to me?” he asks, as politely as he can. He's holding out the letter, his back stiff and straight.

Usagi sits up, and smiles. He's dressed for bed already, so Leo is a little embarrassed bothering him. Like always, though, he motions for Leo to sit next to him and takes the letter.

“Of course.” Usagi isn't looking at him, eyes already poring over the letter. “You don't want Donatello to read it?”

“I want to see it first,” he says, smiling shyly. “It's only addressed to me. From my sister.” That word is strange on his tongue. He's never had a sister.

Usagi looks surprised, but doesn't comment. Instead he smooths out the folds in the page and, as Leo waits, reads through it once in silence. Leo leans forward to get a better look.”

“This is a good letter,” Usagi says. He grins at Leo. “She sounds like a character. You'll like her.”

“So what are you waiting for, then?” Leo asks. His brothers are all full of unique personality. It's no surprise that sensei's first child would be too. “Let's meet her, Usagi-san.”

Will this be like a new family member to Usagi as well? Despite the worries, they've always been welcome here. And Usagi is a warm presence. Like the big brother Leo had to be.

He relaxes, and listens.

* * *

 

_Dear little brother,_

_Mom says your English isn't all that good, but hopefully you can learn a little more and send me a letter too next time. I'll try to write simply for you and our brothers. I don't know any Japanese, except the kanji for my real name. It's Miwa, but everyone calls me Karai. So you should too. Maybe you can even show me how to write it sometime._

_I'm sorry about your father. My father, too, but he couldn't raise me like he did you. My mother said she was sick for three days when she heard Hiroshima was bombed. She was worse after you wrote and she found out he was dead. I was home by then to take care of her. But then she put that package together for you, and I think she's going to be better now that she has a focus. She's already talking about what you need next. Thank you for the old picture of them. She put it next to her bed on the side table._

_Do all Japanese frown like that in your school pictures? You look so serious! But I guess with the war you had to be. We had no bombing, but it wasn't very good for Japanese here either. If you let us write back I'll tell you about the internment camp. It will probably seem less bad compared to your war, but I'm going to be angry about it for a long time! Americans have been as disgusting as the Japanese in China._

_We've heard on the radio that things are very bad in Japan. I'm so glad you're all alive, or we would never get to know each other. Those letters when I was a kid would talk about you and I would pretend I had all these brothers to play with. I got a bit older and I got angry with our father for not being with us, but I started to understand recently. This letter is just in time for that._

_But I wish I had known him._

_I've decided I'm going to write more letters, Leonardo. I need someone to talk to. It must be nice always having brothers to spend time with like you do._

_I have some questions for you, if you have time to write it out:_

_What are our other brothers like?_  
_Why did Father get married a second time?_  
_Do you think he was a good father?_  
_///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////_  
_What are you like? What do you like to do?_

_I guess it makes sense he never told you about me, but it's still upsetting. I would have liked to send letters back and forth between us._

_I'm looking forward to your next letter, brother. Don't feel like you can't accept anything from us, since you're family now. I guess you always have been._

_Your big (bad) sister,_

_\--Karai Tang (Hamato)_

* * *

 

He has a cup of tea with Usagi after, and they talk about little things, like the rabbits in Mariko's garden or if the new baby will be a brother or sister for Jotaro. It's still hard to take in that he has a sister, across the ocean. She doesn't speak a word of Japanese and grew up without knowing any siblings.

Usagi says the blacked-out question is probably about the war or the bomb, but to be careful with his reply, lest it get censored too.

“There will be censored letters for a while yet,” Usagi says, sadly. “Don't let it bother you.”

It does, but Leo tries not to let it show. He thanks Usagi and returns to their room, where his brothers are playing cards with Usagi's set. He joins the next game without a word, and nobody asks about Karai's letter.

That night he struggles through some of it himself, poring over his answers to her. They have to be good, after all. He wants her to like them.

They read it together a few days later, and he can tell his brothers want to know her too, even Raph, who's not looking their way. And his brothers like her too, helping Leo write the letter back that night. Donnie agrees with Usagi, that the censored question is probably about the bomb, and thinks for a moment about how to answer.

“Just say for now it's hard to talk about, because it is,” Donnie says, smoothing out the paper in front of them. “And...I don't know, we'll say the effects are long-term on all of us. They shouldn't black that out, but we're not supposed to discuss radiation.”

Leo hears crashing and laughing outside, but ignores it. It's good to hear Dante well enough to play.

“That's the problem, though,” Raph says, cheek resting against Leo's shoulder. “Like, how can people know it's not some contagious thing unless people explain?”

“Because people are superstitious,” Donnie says, matter-of-fact.

“And we're occupied,” Leo adds. He has no doubt that it would look bad on America if people found out about the wasting away and pain hibakusha endure. The firebombings, too, are clamped down on tightly. Hiroshima is not the only city that was burned to the ground.

The question about themselves is easy and fun to answer—Mikey is the best at this, and makes them laugh talking at length about each good and bad quality. Donnie keeps it under control, and Raph dictates firmly the traits he does not want written about him. Like the snoring, and that when he was ten he tried his first cigarette and threw up.

“That's not even about me!” he says, as Mikey laughs and laughs. The question about sensei is harder, but they manage a couple of paragraphs about his love for them and his good humour. Raph tears up, and has to leave for a few minutes, but the rest of them don't point it out. They all feel it.

They're finishing up the long letter when there's a huge crash from outside, followed by panicked shouting. When Leo rushes out there, terrified of a relapse and with three brothers scrambling behind him, he finds only a broken porcelain tea set. Usagi has gotten there first, and the look in his eyes reminds him of sensei when they did something stupid. The two boys are sitting on the floor and surrounded by broken china.

“That's your mother's,” he says to Jotaro, who immediately bursts into tears. While they watch, Usagi picks them up, and turns Dante towards his brothers.

“The boys will tell Mariko about it when she gets home from the doctor's,” Usagi says. They all know it's just the plain set, and no great loss, but Dante's face is still pale.

“I don't like it when Usagi gets mad,” he says when they're back in the bedroom.

Raph snorts. “Then don't break his tea sets.”

Their little brother pauses when he sees the writing things laid out of the mats, and his face lights up. “Are you writing to Tang Shen? Or Karai? Can you read it to me?”

Leo and Raph look at each other, then at Dante. “Well,” Leo says, “we were going to, but you need to think about what you did tonight.”

Dante's face falls right away. “What?” he says. “Letters are different!”

“No, I think this letter can wait,” Donnie says. He points to the adjoining room, where the bedrolls are put away for the day. Dante groans, but goes where he's told. Leo is sure Jotaro is in the same boat.

When the screen shuts, Mikey flops back down. “You'll let him read it later, right?”

“Shh,” Leo snaps. Paper walls are thin. “Yeah. Of course he'll read it, he just needs to be grounded for a little.”

“Sensei never had to ground us,” Raph says.

Leo sighs. Suddenly he no longer feels like writing. “Do I look scary like sensei?” he asks. When they were in trouble as kids, sensei ... never had to do all that much to them. His disappointment was enough to cow them, at least until it happened again the next time.

Raising his little brothers will never end.

He lets Mikey and Donnie finish off the letter, and goes to weed the garden.

They mail the letter after it's been read to Dante (and his important, seven-year-old wisdom has been taken into account), and life becomes peaceful again.

* * *

 

_Dear Karai,_

_I wish you could have known our father, too. Michelangelo wants you to know that he was serious, but he knew when it was important to stop and laugh at something. This is from Donnie: he had a lot of anger about how things were, but he did the best he could for us. I was already wondering how many more sacrifices he could make when it all ended._

_Raph said that his children were the most important thing to him. He didn't say too much else—forgive that._

_Dante made us laugh, because when we asked what sensei was like he said he liked it when he carried Dante upside down._

_Sometimes I don't know what to say about our father. He had a lot of secrets. I know he loved you as much as he loved us. It must have pained him to be away, Karai. I'm not sure how well we'll do bridging the gap._

_About my brothers (I'll write about myself at the end—I needed my brothers to help me with that one). Donnie could be top of the class at any school on earth if he decided he was going to be. He's gentle, unless someone is interrupting his reading. I'm making him write that, even though he's all flushed! Raphael is only ten months younger than I am, and he's got a temper, but he loves fiercely. He was a soldier for a few months, but the war ended before he was deployed._

_Mikey is a ray of sunshine, really. He smiled all through his injuries and he's smiling right now. You'll never have a warmer friend. Dante is sweet, but I'm afraid we've all spoiled him a bit. He says he's sending a drawing to you with this, so be sure to praise it a lot when you write back._

_Pay attention to the next part, it's how to write the characters for your name..._

* * *

 

Writing like they do improves their English quite a bit, and when Dante goes back to school he returns with 100s on his language tests. He is sure Mikey could do well enough too, but Mikey is raring to leave, and get a job. In class, he daydreams. There's another recession this season, and Leo is considering letting him drop out. But they'll wait until finals are done to decide.

Soon Leonardo is writing to Karai personal letters, simple though they are, along with the family ones. He sends them even when there hasn't been a response yet, and sometimes Tang Shen's envelopes come in groups, always with a little money or a gift. Leo rarely spends the American bills. They're waiting for when he needs them.

He learns so much about her, as much as he's confided about himself. Her mother's husband was fair to her, but violent with Tang Shen, and they were both relieved when he died in an accident. They ran his business successfully until Pearl Harbour, when Shen was brought into the war effort and Karai to a camp in the desert. She doesn't detail the experience, but Leo can feel the hatred for what happened to her. Like Leo and his family, they were lucky—Chinese and unaffected, Shen held down their possessions and waited until January for Karai's return. Karai cried in her bunk when she learned about the bomb on Hiroshima, and the guards taunted her.

But sensei's letters are most important.

They don't touch them for several weeks, continuing to live and work and write as if they don't exist. When they finally open them, and see their father's tidy script, it's another day before they can actually read them. Leo lies awake late into the night about it. Maybe there will be even darker secrets there. Or he'll speak badly about his children—Raph especially. It could crush him.

The next night, they crowd around Donnie, whose expression is hard to read as he goes through the letter. Near the end, he smiles, and Leo's gut eases with relief.

“My dear Tang Shen,” he reads, and Mikey presses in closer to see the text. Donnie pushes him back with his shoulder. “Thank you for your letter. Leonardo has begun taking his first steps; he is very careful about the whole ordeal. Much more cautious than Miwa was. He is so funny when he falls, as he'll frown and then hold out his arms to be put back on his feet.”

They all laugh, Leo flushing as he does, and it's easier. The letter tells Shen to be brave, and that he is sorry she has to get married this way. But that he will always be her friend. At the bottom of the letter, the reason for Donnie's smile is apparent—a print of Leo's little hand is there, with the words “My son would like to sign this too! I would like to see how big Miwa has gotten since I left her.”

They don't fold this letter back up, putting it aside instead.

“Do you think we all have prints in there?” Mikey asks, flopping backwards onto the bedrolls.

“Maybe,” Leo says, reaching over to start unbuttoning Dante's shirt. As intended, Dante pushes him away to get into his nightclothes himself. “We'll have to see as we go through the letters.”

They read one of sensei's nightly, just like Tang Shen's, seeing their lives unfold through the letters. Donnie reading fluently at 3, Raph's protectiveness, Mikey's glow. The letter telling her his wife has died is hard to read.

I don't know how I will care for them alone. It's too much for Leonardo to help, but I have no choice. But he's so good to them--he stops Raphael from crying so quickly.

They're quiet after that, and it's another couple days before they read the next letter.

The fondness for them, for their mothers, warms Leo and makes him feel warmth for their city again. If he's not thinking about the bomb, he can look at the camphor tree in the yard and pretend it's their old one. He had loved his city, when he separated it from the war. He wants to see its rivers clear of bodies again. Houses on every street instead of shacks. Sakura-lined blocks. It makes him imagine his mother watering the garden again. Atsuko carrying on her work, planting neat rows of vegetables and hiding extra rations for them when cards got scarce.

So why does Leo want to drop everything and go to Karai? Is it because there's food and success there, despite everything? People say Hawaii is best, because many more people there are Japanese. The climate is tropical.

But Karai and Tang Shen are not in Hawaii.

Raph says Leo is too attached to her already, and maybe he's right—but Leo says nothing when Raph shoves one more note in with that month's envelope.

One night in late fall Mariko has her baby, and it reminds Leo of when his brothers were born. He had read to his brothers in the next room as Atsuko died and Dante wailed, and after they had huddled together till they slept.

“Mariko says it'll be a girl,” says Usagi, standing just inside the bedroom doorway. He's been shifting from one foot to the other since Mariko doubled over in pain that morning, and returned to bed.

Leo grins at him, but the whole thing has made him anxious as her time approached. Jotaro needs his mother and Usagi needs his wife, but the family doesn't seem worried about her. Leo tries to latch excitement onto his nerves, as Usagi has.

But he isn't involved, of course, and when the midwife gets there he busies everyone on the other side of the house, making dinner and pulling up the last sweet potatoes, and beating tatami mats outside until they're spotless. He shows Dante and Jotaro how to draw an dragon with one stroke of a brush, something sensei taught him years ago. Jotaro is too excited to get it right, but Dante paints until his almost looks like Leo's.

Usagi wakes him before sunrise, and Leo gets to see the baby first, tiny and red with perfect little hands and fingernails. Girl, like her mother said. Mariko will be fine, is up and about again two days later. Leo relaxes, and teases Usagi, whose worry has given way to a childlike joy.

Seeing them together makes Leo ache for his parents.

Life returns to normal, except for tiny clothes in the laundry and sleepless nights from the crying. Dante is adored big brother alongside Jotaro, and they hover as much as they can over little Tomoe. Raphael is good with her too, and he and Leo often watch her when they get home from work, when Mariko makes dinner. Leo is impressed with his brother at times like this, when his patience is channeled fully into keeping Tomoe content. He wonders if Raph will be this gentle a father one day. It's hard to imagine.

Soon they send photos overseas too, ones that Usagi has taken or from the school. A photo of the Miyamoto's house, of Jotaro and Dante playing on the bike, one of baby Tomoe. And a picture of Hiroshima, stuck neatly to the back of another picture for them to peel off. Usagi developed it himself, rather crudely and after dark. The military confiscates any and all evidence of the horror the bomb wrought. It takes some time to figure out how to hint at the photo's presence, but Donnie thinks Tang Shen is sharp enough to read between the lines of their letter and figure it out. Leo believes him. From her old letters, and these ones, he knows she's as resourceful as she is gentle, and cunning. She had to be, to survive her husband relatively unscathed.

That little image is still a big risk, though. Leo expects Usagi to be hauled up before the local unit any day now, but it never happens. But he never hears back about it, either. So maybe it was censored out after all.

Their life becomes a whirl of work, paper and ink, sending out letters and waiting for news to come back in. Their English starts to get usable, but conditions in Kure don't improve so quickly. Even in this fine, very lucky house, some things are hard to come by. Barley has to be mixed in with the rice. Some nights they avoid rice entirely, and the little boys remember from the war not to complain.

Leo wonders if across the ocean would be better for them. The loudest night terrors have subsided, but he knows they all still dream of it. Dante claims he no longer needs to be cuddled up next to Leo, but Leo will still find him pressed into his side in the morning, pillow damp with tears. Leo doesn't mention it.

“What if we left this place?” Leo asks one night. It's 1947, spring again.

“Are you really talking about leaving this house while we're at the table?” Mariko asks, smiling wryly. She's not insulted, but Leo flushes. No, it isn't what he meant. In his lap, baby Tomoe reaches for his bowl. He squishes some rice between his fingers for her to pop into her mouth.

“I mean Japan,” he says, more shyly. “I wonder if it would be better for us in the end. And you know we can't intrude on you forever.”

“I think after this long it's safe to say we're past being guests,” Donnie says. Mariko and Usagi nod, and Leo is relieved. He still worries.

“You can't emigrate yet anyway,” Usagi says. “They're talking about opening it up, but they hardly want the Japanese that live there already.”

Jotaro's back is very straight, which means he has something to say. Leo knows his moods now almost as well as his own brothers. “I went down to the harbour yesterday and American Japanese were getting off. I asked one and he said it's better to come home.”

“Don't bother people at the harbour,” Usagi says sharply. “That's not a safe place to play anyway.”

“Fine,” Jotaro says, reaching for the pot for a second helping. Practiced, Mariko stops him before he gets there.

“We're going to have to hold off on seconds until the weekend, darling,” she says. Leo is reminded of the war days, and feels a twinge.

“I'm not very hungry tonight,” Donnie says. He hands his bowl off to Jotaro. “Thank you for the meal, Mariko.”

Also like the war days. There had been a lot of days, before the rice ran out completely, where they ensured Mikey and Dante filled their stomachs a little more. It's depressing to know it still has to be done.

Mariko nods to Donnie in thanks, and Jotaro forgets to say thank you, devouring his food. They finish their meal quietly, the little boys going with Mikey to look at some festival stalls going up for that week.

“I really am wondering if emigrating would be best,” Leo says, once the tea is out. “Once things have settled down in America.”

“There's nothing here for us,” Donnie adds. “I mean, I don't know. It's not like we have any more school to get through, but--”

“You heard Jotaro,” Raph says. He's frowning hard at his tea. “People are being kicked out of America for being Japanese. They still hate us.”

“But there will still be more opportunities,” Usagi says. “Of course, they're not letting Japanese in, only out. So you have a few years to decide.” He looks in Donnie's direction, and grins at him. “Enough time for you to apply for school, at least. Hiroshima University is taking students again.”

Donnie flushes. Leo can tell how much he aches to go, and it hurts. But Hiroshima is easy to navigate again, if still rubble and shacks. Things grow there as well as they ever did.

“I didn't graduate high school,” he says. The bomb, Leo thinks, made sure of that. “There's no hope for that.”

“We'll see,” says Leo, taking another sip of his tea. “If they knew how smart you were they'd beg to take you.” And they needed brains like Donnie's, in this country. Was it reasonable to abandon this place to its fate?

He looks around at his family. Usagi and Mariko might still have a future here, with their relative wealth and big house. But Leo can't take and take from them forever. Ho long will it be before there are jobs, and enough food, in Japan? And Leo is luckier than most people from Hiroshima—he has an American birth certificate, tucked away in sensei's box. Maybe it will help him get there.

“Well, there is plenty of time to think about it,” Usagi says. “Emigration into the country is closed for now.”

“Would you ever go back?” Leo asks. Usagi lived there as a child, but he came back when his father did. Usagi smiles at him, shakes his head.

“It's a nice thought,” he says. “I think we would stay.”

“Yes,” Mariko says, topping off Leo's tea. “My family is all here. And I'm not sure my husband is brave enough to give everything up.”

Leo meets Usagi's eyes, and he shrugs. Usagi is perfectly brave—but he loves this country, like their fathers did. Leo's love has, he thinks understandably, somewhat cooled.

Later that night, when Mikey is making up a ridiculous story about how sensei and his first wife met for Dante, Raph taps Leo on the shoulder.

“Do you really want to go?” he asks. Leo swallows. Raph is much more open to the letters now, has even added his own notes to Karai. But it doesn't mean his anger at America has cooled at all. Leo nods.

Raph sighs, and Leo braces. “I'll go where the rest of you go,” he says. Leo's gaze snaps up to his face. “And you're right--it can't be worse than here. Right?”

Leo nods. Suddenly he feels like he can't speak.

“I've been eating lunch with an American, you know,” Raph says.

“Nisei?” Leo asks, trying to hide his surprise. Raphael had argued with sensei at length once, about the Japanese-American traitors. After that had been the first time he'd run away, for one night.

Raph reaches for the rumpled bedroll cover to straighten it. “No, his name is Casey Jones. He's posted near the work site and I made fun of him for having missing front teeth. He tried to punch me and we've been friends ever since.”

Leo tucks the covers in more carefully around Donnie. “Who are you?” he asks, face cracking into a grin. “What have you done with my patriotic soldier brother?”

Raph punches his arm. “War's over, stupid. And America still hates us, don't worry—but I don't think this guy hates me.”

“Remember what sensei said?” Leo says. “That the individual in Japan isn't respected, only as an 'honourable' part of a unit. And judgement en masse is what got us into--”

“Please,” Raph says. He's crawled into his bedroll. “He's just an okay guy.”

“Sure, Raph.”

“Shut up.”

* * *

 

_Dear Leo,_

_I'm sorry there's no money this month, but I've sent some candy and books. I hope you like them, they're some of my favourites. Comics, too. Superman and some newspaper funnies Mom clipped out for the kids. The reason there's just letters from me is because Mom isn't feeling well, so we don't have as much to spare. Medicine really adds up._

_But you know all about that. It makes me so angry that you're stuck with this. But it honestly confuses me too, because sometimes I remember I don't even really know you, Leonardo. But I care so much._

_I hate it when I treat these letters like a journal, too, because the censors must read it and you don't need to hear my problems. Don't read this part of the letter to your brothers, okay? If Donnie is still reading for you, swear him to secrecy. I mean it, Leo._

* * *

 

Leo is hanging laundry on the line, and the little boys are playing at being soldiers. He doesn't like their war games, but they rarely stop them. It's harmless play now that destruction isn't imminent.

They giggle madly, for a couple of brave soldiers. Leo smiles, in spite of himself, and starts on the sheets. Did he play soldier as a small child? Yes, he did, with his brothers. But they didn't pretend to be occupiers—they were always Imperial Japanese army, marching through Saipan and Guadalcanal when nobody had yet bothered to stop the expansion. By the time they got to China, Leo was too busy babysitting his brothers.

“That's a nice whore,” Dante says, shaking with laughter. Leo's head snaps up. Dante and Jotaro swagger near the porch, leaning ridiculously against the supports and trees. They slap each other on the shoulders. Western closeness.

Leo drops Mikey's shirt and marches over. He grabs his brother by the arm, who yelps.

“Where did you learn that?”

His voice is unnatural and sharp, and Dante's eyes widen with confusion. Jotaro looks ready to escape, but Leo has him too, as fast as sensei ever was.

“Well?” he says, looking them both over. “Do they talk that way at school? Do your teachers let you say those words?”

Dante is struggling, but not much, because Leo is so much stronger. He looks close to tears. “Men say it all the time! At the market and in the American district!”

Of course they play there, when they're not supposed to go there alone. Leo frowns deeply.

“Does your father say that?” he asks Jotaro, who shakes his head. “Dante? Do your big brothers say that?”

“I thought it was how people talked to pretty girls!” Jotaro cries. “I thought it was rude, but it wasn't--”

“Whatever you thought, it is and you shouldn't,” Leo snaps, and lets go. They freeze, which is what he planned. “It's a very rude word that disrespectful men say to treat women badly.” They really do look like they're about to cry, and Leo realizes in time to smooth his expression back out. “You can't play near the soldiers any more. Or in the black market.”

“But everyone--”

“Everyone but you, apparently,” Leo says. “If you play there again, we're going to have to hold your hands everywhere like you're babies.”

Their horror is in unison, and it's suddenly a struggle not to laugh at their faces. Even so, it's what really firms Leo's resolve to emigrate as soon as he can. Not that America will be more respectful, but at least he can get through it with Karai and Shen. The more letters they send, the more Leo feels like he's not quite complete. Like pieces he didn't know he needed to finish a jigsaw.

To Dante, emigration might as well be eons away, so he usually doesn't listen when the subject comes up. Mikey tells Leo that he hates Japan enough that he'd go anywhere else--it makes Leo's heart ache. For Michelangelo, his dead friends were home, and so was their father. Most of the good parts are ash.

Raph, he knows, will go where his brothers go. And Donnie...

Donnie would too, if Leo asked. But if they left today, Donnie would have to start all over in school to get where he wants to be. So for his sake, he's relieved they'll be here a few years yet.

In cherry blossom season, Leo and Mariko take Donnie to Hiroshima, to get papers for the university. Donnie will be able to live at home, though the commute is long. He can meet with Raph at the train station each day and Leo will know they're safe together.

Only Leo could get the time off work for this, so Mariko takes Usagi's place. At first Leo thinks this is just a gesture of support, but as they approach the building, patchwork repaired, she knocks twice on the gate.

When they look at her curiously, Mariko grins, and briefly Leo can see the girl she once was.

“I know it wouldn't seem that way, but I am educated,” she says. She walks the path like she knows it well, though it's still flanked by old rubble.

“I mean, I only spent a year here,” she adds. Her smile is familiar again. “When my parents got a good match made they made me quit. But they picked the boy I loved, so I didn't kick up a fuss.” She reaches out to squeeze Donnie's shoulder, and Leo shares an amazed smile with his brother. “Maybe I should have. Now this is all near and dear to my heart.”

Leo resolves not to make assumptions about Mariko again. She's always been the gentle, hardworking housewife, but he's underestimated her. Meek people don't survive wars so intact and gentle still.

Two hours later, when they're finally in the dean's office, Leo thanks sensei again for his foresight. Donnie's school papers were all with their things, his grades, the praise, and the advisements that he be placed in high school early. Schematics he drew himself, in rare moments of free time. (Planes, mostly, since he read about Jiro Horikoshi and the Zero fighters.) Physical evidence of Donatello's genius, so he wouldn't have to start over.

“Well, this is very impressive,” says the dean, a sharp-eyed man sensei's age. He is the sort of man who Leo can tell enjoys being stern. “Of course, the matter of your missing credits is still an issue. Even if many of your teachers have said you could have bypassed high school.”

“I implore you to make an exception for me, sir,” Donnie says. There's no shake in his voice. His cheeks are flushed, and Mariko's hand is on his arm, but his back is straight. “I can take whatever tests or examinations are necessary. I'll prove an asset to your university.”

“Why have you not yet returned to school?” the dean asks. He doesn't look up from the document in front of him, the one from Donnie's last teacher saying Donnie must move on to high school, if not further. Leo wants to sink into his chair, and Mariko opens her mouth.

“Illness,” Donnie says. “After the bomb. Then I worked to help support my family—the references are there, from my Japanese supervisor. I'm sure you understand.”

Leo sees the burn scars just above the dean's collar. He does. He thinks he sees the man's resolve crack, just a bit. Behind Donnie, Mariko reaches out to squeeze Leo's arm.

“I will need to do additional background checks,” the dean says, after a moment. It takes physical effort to keep Leo's face smooth and free of a grin. “Your family's koseki, if it wasn't destroyed, and reference letters from the American contingent you work under. In these times the occupiers can be helpful.” He looks up, and his eyes crinkle. “Come back next week with those.”

Leo glances sidelong at Donnie. His cheeks are flushed, eyes expectant. He looks healthier than he has in years.

His brother is braver than Leo will ever be. “And?”

The dean frowns. “And you may sit the entrance exam. There are openings, of course. Nobody wants to go to school in Hiroshima any more.”

“Except me,” Donatello says. He almost knocks their papers over as he scrambles to shake the dean's hand. “I do, sir. I won't disappoint you!”

Leo has to cover his mouth, trying not to laugh. He barely holds it together thanking the dean, and as soon as they're out the door he lets go, having to support himself against the wall.

He can't explain what's so funny, with Donnie so confused and Mariko smiling indulgently at the two of them. “Your face, Donnie,” is all he can manage until they're off the property.

They almost don't get that koseki, the family record, there in time, because Dante gets a sniffle and Leo doesn't want to leave his side. It's only Donatello's near-hysterical “Come on, Leo!” that gets him moving again, leaving Dante in Mariko's capable hands. They make the train. He's fine, of course.

Leo just worries.

They scrape together the tuition somehow, too, when Donatello outdoes himself on the entrance exam—not to mention the other scholars. They wait for the whole family before Donnie opens the envelope, and everyone is silent as he unfolds the paper. Even Tomoe stops her thumb sucking to stare at him.

“Despite your unconventional application,” he reads, “Your entrance exam resulted in a score in the top 1% the institution has ever taken in. Your supplemental material indicates you will be an asset to our program.”

The little boys cheer, and Raph claps Donnie so hard on the back that he starts.

“Guess I'm going to school,” Donnie says weakly, and Leo can feel him shaking slightly, under his hand. He squeezes his shoulder, and he and Donnie read the acceptance packet over carefully, as the others start dinner.

That night, Donnie's nightmares return. Things are changing again.

Even going to Hiroshima every day, Donnie is a better colour and energetic when he starts classes. He makes a few friends there, too, ones who knew the bomb too and love the very same things as Donatello. He often stays late at the school with them, building and reading.

Money is tighter, so tight that Leo finally lets Mikey quit school and get work carrying mail. He's not sure if all of Mikey's jobs are legal, stamped mail, exactly, but he tries not to ask questions. They need that tuition money.

When there is something leftover—there rarely is—Leo lets Dante count out the bills and put them under the floorboards, until Leo can next go to the bank.

On weekends, when they're home together, they take walks, just the five of them. They'll stop and sit under trees, where Donnie will study and Mikey will scramble up into the branches. They go to the harbour and see the massive ships go up in Kure. These days they're peacetime ships, for cargo. They pick out rebuilt parts of Hiroshima, shrouded in mist across the harbour. Then they go home, to the Miyamotos and their laughter.

But Leo longs to get on those great ships.

**Author's Note:**

> Update 10/31: I've been thinking about this the past few days, and the response to this repost...and more might be coming after all. We'll see! Keep your eyes peeled :)


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